Editing huge Unix files

[calbear2000]

I have a huge text file that I need to edit (just need to edit top 10 lines of that file) Its so big that vi and emacs can't handle it. Is there another editor I can use? (I'm sure pico will crash too) Is there an easy way to just edit the top part of the file without having to read the entire thing in?

Thanks

 

[n0cmonkey]

gnu-ed may be what you need. Its a line editor so I think it just loads the current line into memory, not sure though. Also think of using sed or something similar to edit the file. What kind of file is it? If it is a log file, think about rotating them more often. I cant think of any other types of files that would be too large for vi or emacs.

 

[calbear2000]

Thanks! I'll look into sed and awk.

Its a huge rc-extracted circuit netlist. Huge file.

 

[cureless]

What's the size of the file?

I always thought vim's limit on file size was pretty big. (I thought the same about emacs).

Couldn't you use dd to get the beggining of the file, edit and put it back? I've used that for hard disks and it works.

cl

 

[Damascus]

How big is the file? I've used the Midnight Commander built in text editor (mcedit)
to poke around my 50MB log files and everything is still working.

 

[KenCleanAirSystem]

There is a line editor built into vi/vim which should work for what you want to do. It's called 'ex' and should be explained in any decent vi tutorial.

 

[Armitage]

You could use head to grab the top 10 lines of the file into another file, where you could edit them.
Then you could use tail to grab everything but the first 10 lines of the original file, and cat the edited 10 lines back onto it.

Kind of a kluge, but it should work.

Depending on what kind of edits you need to do, sed or awk might work as well.

 

[manly]

emacs doesn't read the whole file in. It reads parts of the file on demand.

I've opened up some pretty big files in emacs before; how big is too big for emacs to handle?

 

[Sunner]

man split

 

[DaHitman]

Let me introduce you to "head" and "tail"...

to see first 10 lines in a file:

head -n 10 <filename>

to see last 10 lines in a file tail -n 10 <filename>


See man pages for more info.