topic Re: manipulating vi editor in Operating System - HP-UX

manipulating vi editor

mw_4 — Sat, 29 Jun 2002 00:19:16 GMT

Hi.
can someone notify me that too big files are editted in vi command..
ie, opening 2GB file first
and insert, delete, ... and so on..
How can I do that? or
the way to go what i want to edit first not open the entire file but open part of file and manipulate

Re: manipulating vi editor

A. Clay Stephenson — Sat, 29 Jun 2002 00:34:06 GMT

You would be wiser to use a scripting language like Perl. If you must use vi then you should use the split command to break the file into more manageable pieces.

split -l 50000 file will split file into fileaa, file ab, fileac, ... each 50,000 lines long. You can edit these and these recombine them using cat file* > newfile.

Man split for details.

Re: manipulating vi editor

Sanjay_6 — Sat, 29 Jun 2002 00:35:18 GMT

Hi,

If this is a long file, you can use split to split the file into parts, edit them and then join them together.

Hope this helps.

Regds

Re: manipulating vi editor

steven Burgess_2 — Sat, 29 Jun 2002 01:09:07 GMT

Hi

Here is a thread regarding editing large files that vi cannot handle

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0x5c1deea29889d611abdb0090277a778c,00.html

Regards

Steve

Re: manipulating vi editor

Bill Hassell — Sat, 29 Jun 2002 01:48:20 GMT

Using vi will never work. At the bottom of the man page is the list of limitations, specifically, 234,000 lines max. But even if your file is only 200,000 lines, vi needs several temp areas which have to be at least as large as the original file, or double the size of the original file.

You have to use sed or awk depensding on what you need to change. An interactive editor w]won't work.