NAME¶

vis-open — Interactively select a file to open

SYNOPSIS¶

DESCRIPTION¶

vis-open takes a list of filenames and directories on the command-line and displays them in a menu for the user to select one. If the user selects a directory (including ..), the directory contents are displayed as a fresh menu. Once the user has selected a filename, its absolute path is printed to standard output.

vis-open uses vis-menu(1) as its user-interface, so see that page for more details.

-p prompt

Display prompt before the list of items. This is passed straight through to vis-menu(1).

-f

Normally, if vis-open is provided with a single filename or directory argument, it will automatically select it (printing the filename to standard output, or presenting a new menu with the contents of the directory). If -f is provided, vis-open will always present the arguments it's given, even if there's only one.

--

If this token is encountered before the first non-option argument, all following arguments will be treated as menu-items, even if they would otherwise be valid command-line options.

If encountered after the first non-option argument, or after a previous instance of -- it is treated as a menu-item.

files

File and directory names to be presented to the user. If a name does not exist on the filesystem and the user selects it, it is treated as a file.

-h

If present, vis-open prints a usage summary and exits, ignoring any other flag and arguments.

EXIT STATUS¶

The vis-open utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

In particular, like vis-menu(1), vis-open prints nothing and sets its exit status to 1 if the user refused to select a file.

EXAMPLES¶

CHOICE=$(vis-open -p "Select a file to stat")
if [ $? -gt 0 ]; then
	echo "No selection was made, or an error occurred"
else
	stat "$CHOICE"
fi

SEE ALSO¶

vis(1), vis-menu(1)

BUGS¶

Because vis-open uses ls(1) to obtain the contents of a directory, weird things might happen if you have control-characters in your filenames.