Call bash function using vim external command

Question

I use vim\'s :! external command function all the time, usually providing % as an argument to the shell command. For example :

:!psql -f %

Answer 1

The accepted answer didn't work for me. I'm going to go with setting shcf, as suggested elsewhere:

:set shcf=-ic

but another solutions is

!source ~/.bashrc && psql ...

Unfortunately, no solution allows the auto-completion for the command I'm creating to work properly. (The auto_completions suggested are for names of files in my current directory, rather than the ones I specified as follows in .bashrc

complete -F _generate_foo_completions foo

Answer 2

This answer assumes your vim isn't actually using bash to invoke the remote commands - this can be tested by running :!echo $0 in vim.

Specifically for vim, add:

set shell=/bin/bash

to your .vimrc.

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In general, there's two strategies I've found to sometimes work when trying to get other programs to invoke my preferred shell:

export SHELL=/bin/bash

in eg. the .profile file, or:

ln -fsn /bin/bash /bin/sh

which updates the sh symlink to point to bash instead.

On many systems (certainly Ubuntu), /bin/sh is a symlink to a sh-compatible shell (such as bash), rather than the sh shell itself. Given this fact, some programs (I've seen this behaviour in GHC) seem to invoke /bin/sh, so changing where it points to will cause the programs to use bash instead.

Answer 3

An alternative to exporting your functions (which may no reach Vim is there's a non-Bash shell in between; see here for such a case), you can instruct Vim to start an interactive shell, so that your .bashrc is read. Just pass the -i flag to Bash, via Vim's :help 'shellcmdflag'.

:set shcf=-ic

Answer 4

Export your functions. That is:

psql-h1() { /usr/bin/psql -hh1 -d mydb "$@"; }

export -f psql-h1  ### <-- THIS RIGHT HERE

This will make them available to any copy of bash run as a child process, even if it's a noninteractive shell and so doesn't read .bashrc.