Editing a 2GB+ file

[Jon Pareles xywrite4@xxxxxxxx]

My email client, Eudora, decided that it could no longer read its In box (In.mbx), and I discovered why: It had grown to more than 2 GB.

In the past, I have fixed Eudora crises by editing In.mbx with XY4, which sees it as just a giant
text file. XY4 will open this file, too, with a message saying Disk Is Full Writing To Overflow
File. There's plenty of room on the disk--I would guess I'm up against some 2GB limit.

I can highight things to be deleted and delete them, which would probably repair the file enough for
use. However, XY4 won't SAve the edited file--it freezes. Wordpad and M$ Word won't let me read the
mbx file, although I have renamed it as a .txt. They just show empty boxes.

Is there any way to deal with this ridiculously large file? For instance, is there some tool to just
chop it in half in the middle? That would destroy one email, but probably make the file small enough
for XY4.

 Or is there another ASCII editor that might be able to handle it?

Jon Pareles