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In short, can single bash commands in the terminal contain conditionals? If so, how?

I have in my vimrc (shared across systems) the following command to open my current LaTeX document in .pdf form: map ,v :!gnome-open %<.pdf <CR> <CR>

My question is, what is the best way to have ,v execute simply "open %<.pdf" when I'm at home on my OS X machine? Here is my pseudo-code guess:

... if [$OSTYPE == "darwin*"] then open %<.pdf else gnome-open %<.pdf ...

This is executed as a single BASH command. Are such conditionals possible? If so, could someone help me with the syntax? If not, can this be done via conditionals in the vimrc file?

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  • If you want to use a single script across all OSes, I follow Jander's suggestion since it seems like you're comfortable enough with bash. Write a bash script that's checks $OSTYPE, uname, which/whereis/type, or whatever is appropriate and call the script from vim using your keybinding. – penguin359 Apr 22 '11 at 6:44
  • @Jander and @penguin359: both of your answers have taught me what I need to know to do this and more. I'm very thankful! – user6845 Apr 23 '11 at 4:07
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An alternate would be to just generate the map keybinding correctly for the OS. For example:

if executable("cmd.exe")
    map ,v :!cmd.exe /C start "" "%<.pdf"<CR><CR>
elseif $OSTYPE =~ "darwin.*"
    map ,v :!open '%<.pdf'<CR><CR>
elseif executable("gnome-open")
    map ,v :!gnome-open '%<.pdf'<CR><CR>
endif

This was tested and appears to work, but as my Vim script is a little shaky and I might have missed some details like proper quoting, I'd probably go more with Jander's approach and just use a shell wrapper which I am far superior in writing.

map ,v :!open.sh '%<.pdf'<CR><CR>

And in ~/bin/open.sh:

#!/bin/sh

if echo "$OSTYPE" | grep "^darwin" >/dev/null 2>&1; then
    open "$@" &
elif type gnome-open &>/dev/null; then
    gnome-open "$@" &
fi
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  • Nice. I missed the idea of doing the OS detection from within the shellscript. One minor point -- I think you mean "gnome-open" instead of "gnome-terminal". – Jander Apr 25 '11 at 4:35
  • @Jander yea, I was thinking there was something funny about what I wrote. – penguin359 Apr 25 '11 at 17:45
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Personally, if I were going to do this, I'd create a ~/bin/open.sh script with whatever "open" command is correct for the OS, and make sure ~/bin is in my path on all my machines. It scales better that way in case I want to add a Windows+Cygwin box, for example. The downside is that you need to have a different script for each type of machine, although the scripts are dead simple so it's really not too bad.

So, in ~/bin/open.sh on the Mac:

#!/bin/sh
open "$@"

And in ~/bin/open.sh on Linux:

#!/bin/sh
gnome-open "$@"

And in vimrc:

map ,v :!open.sh %<.pdf<CR><CR>

...Alternately, if you prefer to have everything on the :! line, then you can use a semicolon wherever you would normally use a newline in a shell script. To adapt your example:

... if [ "$OSTYPE" == "darwin10.0" ]; then open %<.pdf; else gnome-open %<.pdf; fi
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