How to get vim to list the PIDs of selected files that are presently being edited, avoiding recovery mode, and not list all the other files

Solution 1:

after switching my focus to just vim -r, and

• Knowing that vim will try to put the swap file into the same directory as the file it's editing ( thanks to @romainl for the pointer to :help swap-file )

• observing that vim -r reports on the files in the current directory first,

• observing that the file name associated with the swap file is reported before the process id of the vim process, and

• observing that vim appends (STILL RUNNING) if it finds the active process

• I changed the current directory appropriately and ran this code after plugging in the name of the file-to-search-for

   perl -lne '
     last if /^\s+In directory/;
     undef $f if /^\d+/;
     $f = $1 if /^\s+file name:\s+(.*)\s*$/;
     if ( $f =~ m#/file-to-search-for# && /^\s+ process ID:\s(\d+).*?STILL RUNNING/ ) {
       print $1;
       $pid //= $1;
     }
     END { exit !$pid; } '
  

The pid of the running vim process is printed, and the exit status is zero when the appropiate swap file is found, and non-zero if the file was not being edited