Opening multiple documents at once

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I'm trying this:

$ for n in `ls` ;  do xterm -e vim $n  & ; done
bash: syntax error near unexpected token `;'
$

I want to edit my files all at once, not one at a time. How can I do that?

2

Simply remove the semicolon from the statement, the & sign serves as a separator:

for n in * ;  do xterm -e vim "$n"  &   done

It could have been easier if you ran the code from the command line, one line at a time:

for n in * 
  do 
    xterm -e vim "$n"  &                       # optionally use xterm -hold -e vim ...  if needed.
 done
3

Oh, it's so simple! Thanks, that works nicely.