This is a public-domain rewrite of Charles E. Campbell’s mkvimball utility for creating vimball archives. Written in portable Bourne shell, it can serve as a replacement for noninteractive uses on a wide range of Unix and Unix-like systems. A shim is available for drop-in compatibility with mkvimball.

• A relatively recent Bourne or Bourne-compatible (including POSIX-conformant) shell, available at /bin/sh.

• The typical Unix utilities, plus a couple that could be considered atypical:

  • m4 for creating the compatibility shim.

  • make for installation.

  POSIX conformance is ideal, but minor transgressions are fine.

• ShellCheck for optional testing.

• Asciidoctor for regenerating the manual pages. Only necessary if modifying the documentation source.

To install/uninstall the mkvimball-sh utility to/from /usr/local (privileges required, presumably):

To avoid overwriting the original mkvimball, the standard targets omit the compatibility shim, which is also named mkvimball. To install both mkvimball-sh and the shim:

To uninstall the shim (but not mkvimball-sh):

To use an installation prefix other than /usr/local, define the prefix macro when invoking make. For example:

To run basic tests:

The bindir, datarootdir, exec_prefix, man1dir, and mandir macros are supported for unorthodox installation hierarchies. The DESTDIR macro is supported for staged installs. The ASCIIDOCTOR (with ASCIIDOCTORFLAGS), INSTALL, INSTALL_DATA, INSTALL_PROGRAM, M4 (with M4FLAGS), and SHELLCHECK (with SHELLCHECKFLAGS) macros are supported for using alternate tools.

The mkvimball-sh utility copies the contents of its input text files to a vimball archive. The input files can be specified as file operands or as a list of LF-terminated paths on standard input. The archive is written to standard output or, if -f is specified, to archive. If -a is specified, the archive header is omitted from the output so it can be appended to an existing archive; if both -a and -f are specified, archive is appended to instead of overwritten.

The mkvimball shim provides drop-in compatibility with the original mkvimball. It rejects archivebase if it contains a "." character; otherwise, it writes the archive to archivebase.vba.

Consult the man page for more details.

To the extent possible under law, the author has dedicated all copyright and related and neighboring rights to this software to the public domain worldwide. This software is published from the United States of America and distributed without any warranty.

Refer to install-sh for its separate licensing terms.