Re: Reading portions of large files

[pemente@northpark.edu (Eric Pement)]

Gerald.Jean@spgdag.ca wrote in message news:<mailman.100.1042135372.21513.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>...
> Hello,
> 
> I have very large files, sometimes over 1G, from which I would like to 
> edit
> very small portions, the headers or trailers for example.  Emacs won't 
> open
> those files, it complains about them being too big.

  The Emacs FAQ says that Emacs 20 and above can be compiled "on some
64-bit systems" to hande files of up to 550 million Gigabytes. However,
it looks a bit dated and it would be handier if this section of the
GNU Emacs FAQ were brought more up-to-date.

   If you use Windows editors, Vedit (http://www.vedit.com) will edit
files of up to 2 Gigs in size, though it may take some time to load
files of this size.

   And for just over-the-top accommodation, PDT-Windows claims to
handle filesizes of up to 18 Exabytes (that's 18 billion Gigs)!  I
wonder if that is larger than the aggregate storage of all disks on
the Internet? On a more realistic plane, their website says they
have "easily edited files of 3 - 5 gigabytes".

   I've downloaded the eval version, and this editor is intended
for editing large databases or binary files. It won't work well for
plaintext or concatenated.tar program code. If you're interested,
the URL is http://www.pro-central.com/pdt_win.htm

HTH.

--
Eric Pement