Qfyilyi

I wrote a function in bash to see manpages in vim

viman () { man "$@" | vim -R +":set ft=man" - ; }

This works fine, the only problem occurs if I pass a manpage to it which doesn't exist. It prints that the manpage doesn't exist but still opens vim with an empty buffer.

So, I changed the function to check the error code ( which is 16 here ) and exit if the manpage doesn't exist. The modefied function looks somewhat like this -

viman () { man "$@" | [[ $? == 16 ]] && exit 1 | vim -R +":set ft=man" -  ; }

But, now it doesn't do anything!!

I just want to quit the program if the manpage doesn't exist otherwise open the manpage with vim

Try this: capture the man output, and if successful launch vim

viman () { text=$(man "$@") && echo "$text" | vim -R +":set ft=man" - ; }

I like the idea of checking the man return code; you can't pipe to the test, though. You could just run man twice:

viman () { man "$@" >/dev/null 2>&1 && man "$@" | vim -R +":set ft=man" - ; }

This runs man ... | vim ... only if the first invocation of man was successful.

Based on this answer this starts vim and exits if there's nothing in the buffer. The disadvantage is that it starts vim so the screen "flashes". It also doesn't set an exit code when a man page isn't found.

viman () { vim -R +':set ft=man|exe !search(".")?"quit!":""' <(man "$@" 2>/dev/null); }

This is an improvement on Jeff Schaller's answer in that it doesn't load the the man page twice when it exists. It also doesn't load vim unnecessarily like my previous example. And it does set an exit code when there's no man page.

viman () { man -f "$@" >/dev/null 2>&1 && vim -R +":set ft=man" <(man "$@"); }

Both examples use Bash process substitution in order to avoid the "Vim: Reading from stdin..." message.

Neither loads the page into a variable.