CODEWITHSUNDEEP
vim
octopusgrabbus
octopusgrabbus

Reputation: 10685

How To Clear vim RO Flag

My test.pl was under control of the Perl debugger. I forgot that, and tried to modify the file, but vim told me the file was protected against writes and showed an RO in the status line. (I'm using gVim.)

I closed the debugger, and checked the protections on test.pl

-rwxrwxr-x 1 ics ics 494 Jul 3 15:25 test.pl

Even when I performed an e! on test.pl (using ftp:// syntax); closed test.pl and re-opened the file, it was still showing RO. I had to close vim; restart it; and upon loading test.pl again, its protections were correct.

How can I clear the RO flag without exiting vim?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1803

Answers (1)

Keith Thompson
Keith Thompson

Reputation: 263197

Just type

:se noro

which is short for:

:set noreadonly

(followed by Enter, of course).

That will tell vim that you're not editing the file in read-only mode, but it won't override any system-level protections if you don't have permission to write to it. (There might be resaons other than the directory permission bits that you wouldn't be able to write to a file; for example, the file might be locked or on a read-only file system.)

Upvotes: 3

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