In order to make searching more useful, vi gives special meanings to several characters when they are used in patterns. For example, the circumflex or caret character (^) stands for the beginning of a line. Move the cursor to the next line and type:

/^All

vi will look for the word All occurring at the beginning of a line.

The end of a line is represented by the dollar sign ($). Move the cursor to the next line and type:

/plum$

You will see that vi searches forward for a line that ends in the word plum.

Inside patterns, the dot (.) stands for any character. For example, move the cursor to the top of the file and type:

/t.e

You will see that the cursor moves to the word the. Type / over and over, and you will see the cursor keep jumping forward to any sequence of three letters that starts with t and ends in e. Were you surprised that the cursor jumped into the middle of the word slithey? vi finds character strings, even when they are in the middle of larger words.

Inside patterns, a dot followed by an asterisk (.*) stands for any sequence of zero or more characters. For example, type:

/^A.*g$

You will find the next line that begins with the letter A, ends with the letter g and has any number of characters in between.

Character

Stands for:

^

Beginning of the line

$

End of the line

.

Any character

.*

Any sequence of zero or more characters

What happens if you want to search for a character that has a special meaning in patterns? For example, suppose you want to search for the string 2.3*25 somewhere in a file. If you just type:

/2.3*25

vi will think the 3* stands for zero or more occurrences of the digit 3, not the * character. In such cases, put a backslash (\) in front of any characters with special meanings, as in the example:

/2\.3\*25

Notice that we had to put a backslash in front of the dot as well as the asterisk; both have a special meaning in patterns.