Re: Editing a 2GB+ file

[Carl Distefano cld@xxxxxxxx]

Reply to note from Jon Pareles  Sat, 25 Oct
2008 00:52:30 -0700 (PDT)

Jon:

> 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.

With Xy4, the size limit is more like 4 MB -- that's *Mega*bytes.
You can forget Giga.

Some of these other editors claim to handle files of any size, but
there are real-world limits. I just tried using EditPad to do a
search-and-replace on an 18 MB file. It took forever, then
crashed. Maybe more RAM would have helped: my Windows machine has
1 GB. (It seemed like a lot in 2004.)

But fear not. I just used Xy4+U2 on the same machine to do the
same search-and-replace (CI command) on the same 18 MB file. It
worked; 182,000+ changes in about 6 seconds. Soon you'll be able
to do the same -- on files up to 2 GB in size. We've been working
intensively on the big-file problem since August (well, Robert
has; I just sit back and enjoy the show), so your query is
fortuitous, in both senses of the word.

--
Carl Distefano
cld@xxxxxxxx