Vim: Warning: Output is not to a terminal

jeanluca has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Dear Monks

I tried to execute the following command in my perl script:

`vimdiff live/$file test/$file` ;
[download]

Which doesn't return the graphical window with the differences, but shows on the command line

Vim: Warning: Output is not to a terminal
[download]

and the terminal doesn't respond to anything anymore.

Any suggestions how to fix this ?

Cheers
LuCa

UPDATE: thnx moritz, system works!!

Comment on Vim: Warning: Output is not to a terminal Select or Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Vim: Warning: Output is not to a terminal by moritz (Cardinal) on Jun 22, 2010 at 08:43 UTC
Use diff, not vimdiff. Alternatively you can use expect to capture output to the terminal.	[reply]
Re^2: Vim: Warning: Output is not to a terminal by jeanluca (Deacon) on Jun 22, 2010 at 08:52 UTC
diff is not the same thing as vimdiff. Is there, for example, no way to start the command in a new shell/terminal ?	[reply]
Re^3: Vim: Warning: Output is not to a terminal by moritz (Cardinal) on Jun 22, 2010 at 09:06 UTC
I might have misunderstood what you try to accomplish. Since you've used backticks, I assumed you want to obtain the output from vimdiff - which doesn't work that way, because vim talks to the terminal directly instead of printing to STDOUT. That's why I suggested diff instead, which does print to STDOUT. If you want to spawn an interactive vim, just use system - works fine here.	[reply]