VITMP(1)

💅 VITMP 💅

okay bestie, so this is the manual page for vitmp, from the General Commands Manual. sit down, hydrate, and let me tell you about the most niche little wrapper you've ever met 🫶

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✨ NAME ✨

vitmp — edit temporary files. that's it. that's the whole job. and she does it flawlessly. 👑

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🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

vitmp [VIM options] FILE...

literally just throw your VIM options and your files at her and she'll handle it 💅

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

okay so vitmp is a wrapper around the VIM editor, right? but not just any wrapper — she's a wrapper with standards. you use her when you need to invoke the editor in a way that's guaranteed to be suitable for editing temporary files used with programs like crontab(1) and edquota(8). iconique behaviour only 💖

the instance of the editor that gets invoked? that's /bin/vi. not vim, not nvim, not whatever your dotfiles are doing — /bin/vi, periodt.

now the important part, so listen up 🔥 in particular, it is guaranteed that the file, if edited, will be overwritten in place — such that the modified contents may be read back via a previously obtained file descriptor. that's the whole magic trick, iykyk. invoking the editor via vitmp also makes sure that no additional editor temporary files are used. none. zero. clean girl aesthetic ✨

⚠️ okay but real talk bestie — please note that vitmp offers no crash recovery capabilities. if the editor crashes during the overwrite, data may be lost. like, gone gone 😭 back it up, i'm begging you.

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🎀 HISTORY 🎀

vitmp first appeared in Openwall GNU/*/Linux 1.0. a true vintage queen, she's been slaying since day one 💜

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🧚 AUTHORS 🧚

Solar Designer <solar@owl.openwall.com> — the main character who made all this happen 👑

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

• crontab(1)
• vi(1)
• vim(1)
• edquota(8)

go read those next, bestie, i'll wait 🍓

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and that's the whole page!! brought to you by the Openwall Project, dated 25 April 2002 — yes she's retro, no she's not outdated, we stan a timeless legend 💫