>> Just out of curiosity, why are you trying to >> edit a 1 GB file with any text editor? I'm >> assuming that these files are flat file >> databases. > > I need to do that quite often. They are usually > log files from a long running program in debug > mode.
I find that pre-processing with grep/sed/awk first in a stream-like fashion can trim the file down to a manageable size before I heave the power of Vim at the problem. If, for example, I'm only interested in the ERRORS and want to skip the WARNINGs or the DEBUGs in the file, I might use bash> grep ERROR infile.log > smaller.log bash> vi smaller.log or I might want to strip out the DEBUG level lines: bash> grep -v DEBUG infile.log > smaller.log I've had a couple log files clock in at over 300 megs...nothing so gargantuan as over a gig, but the principle is the same. -tim
