manipulating vi editor

[mw_4]

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

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

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.

[Sanjay_6]

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

[steven Burgess_2]

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

[Bill Hassell]

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.