On Fri, 12 May 2000 13:45:53 -0700 Bob George <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> "Samuel W. Heywood" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> I have a problem. I have a very large text file consisting of a
>> concatenated archive of emails (501,382 bytes). I want to split it
>> up into several smaller and more manageable files. The file is too
>> large to load into any of my text editors or file viewers. I need to
>> to search for an old message [...]
> If the original messages are still in mailbox format, you could use a stream
> editor to search for occurences of the text you're after occuring between
> "From: " lines and print those out. The beauty of a stream editor is that it
> works on (surprise) the stream of characters and doesn't need to read the
> file into memory. They can be quite snappy.
> Back in my heaviest DOS days, I used a port of "sed" (stream editor) derived
> from Unix. Not sure where you'd find it now, but it's surely out there
> somewhere. There may be a better solution.
Thanks for your suggestions Bob. I am familiar with stream editors and have
found them to be excellent tools for use when searching for text. As for
the task of splitting a very large file into several smaller files, a stream
editor would not work unless one wants to resort to a work-around involving
redirecting the output of searches to files, or performing numerous screen-
capture operations of search results. I believe there is indeed a much
better solution for what I need to do. See Torben Joergensen's post in the
same issue where yours appears.
Sam Heywood
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