Re: [h-e-w] buffer size

[Tom A Baker]

I hear you, and would like any informatino people have about dynamic memory use 
in Emacs or Windows Emacs.
If you have 512 Mb of RAM, it -would- be nice if Emacs could use it for a 400Mb 
file.

But...

Googling on it reveals that Emacs 19 had a 8 MB limit, and that
this limit YOU ran into may not be the result of any arbitrary
programmer, but the limit imposed by32 bit addressing.

A couple of years ago, there was a thread about how addressing up
to some good fraction of a Gig was available on 64 bit machines.

So the message about cutting the file size with other tools is a
good suggestion.  Personally, I would prefer to just load the
huge file, but I end up using "split" on text files.  A
combination of "head" and "tail" also can give you the exact
ranges you want.

Or ... <Warning Feature Suggestion> ... give Emacs -back- its old
ability to "page" through big files, which TECO had in abundance.

Tom
Emacs: not just a text editor, it's a way of life.

   Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2003 15:28:12 -0500
   From: Brent Everitt <address@hidden>
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   I have a really large (roughly 400 Mb) text file to edit. When I try and 
load into emacs I get "maximum buffer size exceeded" or some such.  What is the 
best way around this?

   (I am running this on a laptop running Windows XP, with 512 Mb ram)

   Thanks,
   Brent


   ________________________________________________________________
   Brent Everitt                         Department of Mathematics, 
                                          University of York, 
   http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~bje1     York YO10 5DD, England

   phone: +44 (0)1904 433083             fax: +44 (0)1904 433071
   ________________________________________________________________

    From: "Brent Everitt" <address@hidden>
    To: <address@hidden>
    Sent: Thursday, November 20, 2003 8:28 PM
    Subject: [h-e-w] buffer size


    >
    > I have a really large (roughly 400 Mb) text file to edit. When I try and
    load into emacs I get "maximum buffer size exceeded" or some such.  What is
    the best way around this?
    >
    > (I am running this on a laptop running Windows XP, with 512 Mb ram)
    >
    > Thanks,
    > Brent


    It depends very much on what kind of editing you want to do.  The Unix
    Stream EDitor (sed) was designed for this kind of problem, and if you want
    to perform a number of well defined operations without actually looking at
    the file then Cygwin sed might be a (free) way forward.  Alternatively,
    Cygwin split should allow you to split the file into (say) 100Mb chunks that
    you might then be able to edit using Emacs.

    Francis