Tukukkk

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.