To illustrate, here's how to do it from the command-line:
vim `grep "hello" * -Rl`
This opens vim with all the files that have "hello" in them (-l gives the filenames alone). I want to do the same thing, but from within vim. Conceptually, something like this (which doesn't work):
:args !grep "hello" * -Rl
I'm open to completely different approaches to achieve this; I'd just like it to be on one line (so it's easy to edit and redo).
The answer is to simply use backticks - but with a key proviso! The below does not work for me, because of the quotes around hello
:
:args `grep "hello" * -Rl`
But it works if I remove them or escape the quotes:
:args `grep hello * -Rl`
:args `grep \"hello\" * -Rl`
(this was buried in the comments after chaos' answer - I added them here to make them more visible, in case anyone else had this problem)