Line too long problem in vi

[Ramsunder S]

Hi,
Quite often we face the problem of "line too long" because of long trace lines while opening a file in vi. Is there a way to set the max line size while opening a file in vi.

Regards,
Ram.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

You are hitting the hard 2048 character limit. You might try another editor; e.g. emacs.

[Uday_S_Ankolekar · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Use fold command before using vi. man fold for more info,

Also you use new version of called vim , you can get this from porting centre
http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/hppd/

-USA..

[S.K. Chan]

It's vi's buffer limit ( I think max is 2048 characters in a single line ). You can download "vim" which is the improved version of vi.
http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/hppd/hpux/Editors/vim-6.1/

[Ramsunder S]

Thank you all for your replies. Will download vim and check it out.
Just curious, is this 2048 limit hard-coded for vi. I mean is there no variable that can be set to increase this limit.

Regards,
Ram.

[S.K. Chan]

Apparently there is .. but I'm not sure how it's done. If you look at patch PHCO_27057 (vi cumulative patch for 11.11), from the patch description ..

vi(1) was unable to handle files containing lines of length greater than 2048 characters.This was because, the buffers used in vi(1) were limited to 2048 characters.
Resolution:
The size of buffers has been changed from 2048 to 4096 characters.

So if you're running 11.11 the limit is doubled by installing this patch. I did not look at patches for other version of OS.