vim-recovery

vim-recovery

vim-recovery is a utility to find and recover swapfiles.

Rationale

After a system crash, my system is often littered with Vim swapfiles. I usually want to do two things. (1) Recover my in-progress work (unsaved files) and (2) remove any unmodified files to prevent Vim from prompting me about the swapfile whenever I open a file.

find . -type f -name "*.sw[a-p]" doesn't take into account the actual type of the file. For example, it finds Shockwave Flash files (*.swf).

vim-recovery searches directories for swap files and checks the header of the file to determine if it actually is a Vim swapfile.

Installation

$ gem install vim-recovery

Usage

$ vim-recovery --help
Usage:  vim-recovery [options] [paths...]
Commands:
    -l, --list                       Find and list Vim swapfiles
        --clean                      Delete unmodified swapfiles if process is not still running
Options:
    -r, --recursive                  Also search subdirectories
    -v, --verbose                    Be more verbose

        --version                    Show version
    -h, --help                       Display this help

Finding swapfiles

The "M" flag means the file was modified, and the "R" flag means the process is still running. The output is tab-delimited to make it easier to parse with tools such as cut.

$ vim-recovery --list
[ R]	./.gitignore.swp	~speckins/git/vim-recovery/.gitignore
[MR]	./.README.md.swp	~speckins/git/vim-recovery/README.md
[ R]	./.vim-recovery.gemspec.swp	~speckins/git/vim-recovery/vim-recovery.gemspec
[  ]	./.crashed.txt.swp	~speckins/git/vim-recovery/crashed.txt

Removing unmodified swapfiles

$ vim-recovery --clean --verbose
./.crashed.txt.swp

$ vim-recovery --list
[ R]	./.gitignore.swp	~speckins/git/vim-recovery/.gitignore
[MR]	./.README.md.swp	~speckins/git/vim-recovery/README.md
[ R]	./.vim-recovery.gemspec.swp	~speckins/git/vim-recovery/vim-recovery.gemspec

Recursively cleaning swapfiles

$ vim-recovery --clean --recursive --verbose
./.crashed.txt.swp
./lib/vim_recovery/.crashed.txt.swp

Filtering the output of --list

$ vim-recovery --list --recursive
[ R]	./.gitignore.swp	~speckins/git/vim-recovery/.gitignore
[MR]	./.README.md.swp	~speckins/git/vim-recovery/README.md
[ R]	./.vim-recovery.gemspec.swp	~speckins/git/vim-recovery/vim-recovery.gemspec
[M ]	./.crashed.txt.swp	~speckins/git/vim-recovery/crashed.txt

$ vim-recovery --list --recursive | grep -a '^\[M \]' | cut -f2
./.crashed.txt.swp

Vim options

The directory option can be added to .vimrc to make it easier to find swapfiles. This is not necessary to use vim-recovery, but it can make it faster. (It takes a long time to search the 900,000+ files in my home directory.)

" .vimrc:
set directory=~/tmp/swapfiles//

For Unix and Win32, if a directory ends in two path separators "//" or "\\", the swap file name will be built from the complete path to the file with all path separators substituted to percent '%' signs. This will ensure file name uniqueness in the preserve directory.