Re: Maximum buffer size exceeded

[Harish Narayanan]

Thanks Kin.

I do things like that when I need to edit the last or first few lines. 
What if the portions I need edited are at some arbitrary line numbers in 
the middle? I don't always know exactly where they will be.

Harish

Kin Cho wrote:

> Harish Narayanan <harish@gamebox.net> writes:
>
>  
>
> > I've been trying to open a large file (208 MB) but I receive the
> > error "Maximum buffer size exceeded" and Emacs fails to open the
> > file. This is Emacs 21.2.1 on a Redhat GNU/Linux 9 box.
> >
> > I tried searching in the archives, and noticed this has been
> > asked before, but the responses don't seem encouraging. Is there
> > a way of working around this that's arisen in the recent past?
> >    
>
> Use head/tail/dd to extract the small part of the file you want
> to edit, edit that small file, then use cat/head/tail/dd to put
> it back into your original file.
>
> Let's say you want to edit the last line of the file 208MB, which
> is 1 million lines long:
>
> tail -1 208MB > foo
> emacs foo
> (head -999999 208MB; cat foo) > new-208MB
>
> -kin
>
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