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<p>In <code>:w !sudo tee %</code>...</p> <h2><code>%</code> means "the current file"</h2> <p>As <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/a/2600852/211563">eugene y pointed out</a>, <code>%</code> does indeed mean "the current file name". Another use for this in Vim is in substitution commands. For example, <code>:%s/foo/bar</code> means "<strong>in the current file</strong>, replace occurrences of <code>foo</code> with <code>bar</code>." If you highlight some text before typing <code>:s</code>, you'll see that the highlighted lines take the place of <code>%</code> as your substitution range.</p> <h2><code>:w</code> isn't updating your file</h2> <p>One confusing part of this trick is that you might think <code>:w</code> is modifying your file, but it isn't. If you opened and modified <code>file1.txt</code>, then ran <code>:w file2.txt</code>, it would be a "save as"; <code>file1.txt</code> wouldn't be modified, but the current buffer contents would be sent to <code>file2.txt</code>.</p> <p>Instead of <code>file2.txt</code>, you can <strong>substitute a shell command to receive the buffer contents</strong>. For instance, <code>:w !cat</code> will just display the contents.</p> <p>If Vim wasn't run with sudo access, its <code>:w</code> can't modify a protected file, but if it passes the buffer contents to the shell, <strong>a command in the shell <em>can</em> be run with sudo</strong>. In this case, we use <code>tee</code>.</p> <h2>Understanding tee</h2> <p>As for <code>tee</code>, picture the <code>tee</code> command as a T-shaped pipe in a normal bash piping situation: it directs output to specified file(s) and <strong>also sends it to standard output</strong>, which can be captured by the next piped command. </p> <p>For example, in <code>ps -ax | tee processes.txt | grep 'foo'</code>, the list of processes will be written to a text file <strong>and</strong> passed along to <code>grep</code>.</p> <pre><code> +-----------+ tee +------------+ | | -------- | | | ps -ax | -------- | grep 'foo' | | | || | | +-----------+ || +------------+ || +---------------+ | | | processes.txt | | | +---------------+ </code></pre> <p>(Diagram created with <a href="http://www.asciiflow.com/" rel="noreferrer">Asciiflow</a>.)</p> <p>See the <a href="http://ss64.com/bash/tee.html" rel="noreferrer"><code>tee</code> man page</a> for more info.</p> <h2>Tee as a hack</h2> <p>In the situation your question describes, <strong>using <code>tee</code> is a hack because we're ignoring half of what it does</strong>. <code>sudo tee</code> writes to our file and also sends the buffer contents to standard output, but <strong>we ignore standard output</strong>. We don't need to pass anything to another piped command in this case; we're just using <code>tee</code> as an alternate way of writing a file and so that we can call it with <code>sudo</code>.</p> <h2>Making this trick easy</h2> <p>You can add this to your <code>.vimrc</code> to make this trick easy-to-use: just type <code>:w!!</code>.</p> <pre><code>" Allow saving of files as sudo when I forgot to start vim using sudo. cmap w!! w !sudo tee > /dev/null % </code></pre> <p>The <code>> /dev/null</code> part <strong>explicitly</strong> throws away the standard output, since, as I said, we don't need to pass anything to another piped command.</p>
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