Re: cut fails with "cut: memory exhausted" when taking a large slice

[Mordy Ovits]

On Wednesday 21 April 2004 03:35 pm, Jim Meyering wrote:
> If you want to continue using cut, you'll have better
> luck with the latest:
>
>   ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.2.1.tar.gz
>   ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.2.1.tar.bz2

Excellent.  Will do.

> Or, just use head and tail with their --bytes=N options.
>
> e.g., head --bytes=N < FILE | tail --bytes=412569600
>
> where N is chosen so that the head command outputs everything
> in the file up to and including the desired range of bytes.

Sure, but that reads the whole file and pushes it through the pipe.  That's 
far more IO than is strictly necessary.  This is especially true with a 9GB 
file.

Thanks,
Mordy
-- 
Mordy Ovits
Network Security
Bloomberg L.P.