Open a text file to a specific line number
May 28, 2007 - 4 Comments
John Talbot writes in with this useful terminal tip: “I spend a lot of time writing scripts and editing text through the terminal, so if I get a script error telling me that line 240 is messed up, I use the following command to quickly access the problematic line: nano +240 script.sh” I found this to be a really useful command, if you’re unclear of the syntax it’s simple: nano +linenumber filename
hey that’s actually pretty useful for command line tools like nano, but is there a way to do it with a gui editor? I doubt it, but then again you can just easily skip to a line in things like TextWrangler
In vim, the command is :
:[line number]
So to go to line 240 would be :240
talentpoolz:
bbedit supports the same syntax “bbedit +240 script.sh”
While dbr is right that inside vim you would type “:240″ you can also use exactly the same command with vim as nano so “vi +240 script.sh” works from the command line.
On a historic note, this was added to vi so you could jump to a line mentioned in an error message from the C compiler and command line IDEs used it extensively.