didn't know vi had a limitation on number of chars in a line. It sounds to me that its not a ascii file? Or can it be that there are some binary strings in it.
Check with: file If it returns ASCII then use more or tail like Mark suggested.
There is no limit on line length in a file. Some applications have a limit though and "vi" is one of them. Check out "vim" as mentioned above. It is a "vi" clone with added features "vim=vi improved"
Never preceed any demonstration with anything more predictive than "watch this"
I am trying to chop out the file part of a file by piping a head and tail command together. An example is:
head -213 test.txt | tail -42 > test2.txt
to grab lines 171-213 of a file.
The problem is, my command sometimes returns only partial lines (the last line is truncated).
Do you all suppose this is a similar limitation of head or tail? Why are my lines being truncated? Is there a workaround? I don't throw a "line too long" error, but this sounds like it might be the problem.
