On Thu, April 5, 2007 9:40 am, Jean-Rene David wrote:
>> 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.
Actually, you can think of a log file as a sort of flat file database.
Here's an example
...
2007-04-05 07:15 INFO - Starting process
2007-04-05 07:20 DEBUG - foo is non-zero
2007-04-05 08:15 WARNING - Cannot write to /dev/foo file
2007-04-05 10:15 CRITICAL - Lost db connectivity
...
This may look like a regular log file, but using a tool such as awk, you
can split it into a 4-column text database with the following columns:
* datestamp
* timestamp
* logtype
* message
Then, like Tim said, you could grep based on any column value to "query"
the information that you really need, write that to a new file, and
*then* view/edit it using Vim.
HTH!
Tom Purl
