Fridjoff said:
Just as a matter of interest: who can actually read a 4 Gb plain text
file? I mean how long would it take you? What could it be anyway? 4 Gb
of source code in one file perhaps? How does one handle that amount of
code in one file?
Just to put things into perspective, the combined texts of
Shakespeare's Hamlet, Macbeth, Otello and sonnets combined amount to
less than 500 Kb, Darwin's 'Origin of species' is less than 1.3 Mb and
Adam Smith's capitalist's gospel, 'An inquiry into the wealth of
nations' etc., is 2.2 Mb, all in plain text.
I don't know what big files the OP was talking about, but someone
recently posted this :
<quote>
Actually, what I find use for is a fast text reader for large text
files such as are produced by Mozilla and Pegasus email. I've had
occasion to try to track down text in their large archives. Then my
technique of using a file pointer and dumping just small quantities of
file data into memory at a time come in handy. I find that many text
viewers don't work that way and they get bogged down and even crash.
Readers designed for use in Windows seem to rely on dumping a entire
file into memory and that's bad news. If they don't crash, they are
slow as mollases
At least on the PCs I've used which have never had
huge amounts of RAM.
<quote>
He was happy with the proposed ListXP (on Windows ME).
It uses very little memory : opening a 56GB text file uses only about
30MB of memory and still allows you to scroll and search through the
file naturally (i.e. random access with a scrollbar) and at full speed.
You can also think of e.g. log files.
One might be interested in as much detail as possible e.g. concerning
the state of a system, associated with (certain) errors or other events.
So you would need to record constantly, which can mean (very) big files,
which you can then search afterwards for the events to get at the
associated details.
You can also think of e.g. exporting the registry to a text file, which
certainly on XP produces a seriously big file.
This can come in handy later, e.g. in case or really big trouble, like
having to reformat.
Although you cannot just import that text file, you can search it for
some crucial keys, and maybe save a lot of time with what you find.
HTH
