how to open a large text file to see data

They allocate part of the physical memory and mount it on the filesystem. RAM drives are used to speed up operations with especially big files. In that case, we can use a special approach to leverage whole file buffering - a RAM drive. When plenty of RAM is available for the file we want to work with, the bottleneck will only be disk IO. Using these editors might be the best choice due to performance reasons: they’re much faster than using a (disk-based) swap. Some commonly used editors require the whole file to fit in physical memory: Of course, the network packets during transfer employ the same strategy.Īs we’ll see below, we can leverage the same idea for reads and seeks. For example, files can be automatically split during transfer. rwxrwxrwx 1 x x 12G Aug 01 00:00 rejoinedhugefile Similarly, after we finish processing, we can rejoin the chunks via cat (concatenate) and redirection: $ time cat x* > rejoinedhugefile Splitting into 50MB chunks ( –bytes=50M), we get multiple full 50MB files and one 39MB file.

rwxrwxrwx 1 x x 12G Aug 01 00:00 hugefileīefore the split, we can see the file was around 12GB. rwxrwxrwx 1 x x 12G Aug 19 12:53 hugefile We can just temporarily split the file in question: $ ls -lh That doesn’t necessarily mean permanently restructuring data. Use head or tail to get the first or last n lines head wordlist.txtįor editing text, refer to this question.The most basic way of dealing with huge files is to not have them in the first place. # Show all Lines ending with x and use less for better viewing (thanks for suggesting -n option grep to get only the lines you're interested in: # Show all Lines beginning with A: Suppressing line numbers with the -n option will avoid this problem. The default (to use line numbers) may cause less to run more slowly in some cases, especially with a very large input file. Less does not have to read the entire input file before starting, so with large input files it starts up faster than text editors like vi (1). View files with less (Scroll with Space, End, Home, PageUp, PageDown Search with '/something' Leave with q). Don't use a text editor for viewing text.

How to open a large text file to see data