How to view huge txt files in Linux?

Question

I have got a 4 GiB txt file that I need to view.

When I try to open it in Gedit it loads for a while and then crashes.

Do you have any ideas for a text editor that I can use to view this file? My OS is Fedora 20.

see also: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/159521/text-editor-to-open-big-giant-huge-large-text-files — voy, Jan 18 '18 at 14:53
Stack Overflow is a site for programming and development questions. This question appears to be off-topic because it is not about programming or development. See [What topics can I ask about here](http://stackoverflow.com/help/on-topic) in the Help Center. Perhaps [Software Recommendations Stack Exchange](http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/) would be a better place to ask. — jww, Aug 28 '18 at 10:22
Use the split command. See https://askubuntu.com/a/28861/108176 for details. — Alan Hamlett, Sep 02 '18 at 22:04

voy · Answer 1 · 2021-06-19T22:46:33.380

52

BEHOLD! Since glogg looks unmaintained klogg is better alternative nowadays

apt install klogg

Try glogg. It worked great for me.

Debian:

apt-get install glogg

Fedora:

yum install glogg

edited Jun 19 '21 at 22:46

answered Jan 18 '18 at 14:49

voy

1,568
2
17
28

6

Best answer so far. Works like a charm. – BornToDrink Apr 17 '18 at 08:40
2

@BornToDrink What you said! Great for viewing immense files with zero latency – w00tland May 02 '18 at 08:18
1

Tried glogg on Windows 10 and it is amazing. Perfectly does the job. – Nitb Aug 03 '18 at 06:01
7

Note that this requires a GUI and isn't a command-line-only tool. – WackGet Aug 26 '18 at 17:30
1

Glogg seems unmaintained. There is an active fork -- [klogg](https://github.com/variar/klogg) – fav Apr 21 '21 at 21:15
Glogg reproducably makes my laptop crash when doing a simple search. Do you need to have, like, 32 GB RAM to use this? – WoodrowShigeru Jun 19 '21 at 18:07
@WoodrowShigeru - try `klogg` as mentioned in comment above. Also, edited my answer. – voy Jun 19 '21 at 22:48
Hm, okay this doesn't crash, but it's still slow. And it doesn't find matches for `^insert` in a mysqldump file. Thanks for trying to help anyway. – WoodrowShigeru Jun 20 '21 at 19:22
@WoodrowShigeru dev builds of klogg should be 3-5 times faster than 20.12 release. As for search results, could you open an issue at https://GitHub.com/variar/klogg? – fav Aug 16 '21 at 21:14

score 29 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 21 '14 at 00:15

29

Not text editors, but in the command line tail -n 100 ./file.txt will give you the last 100 lines of a file, head -n 100 ./file.txt will give you the first 100 lines.

vim in the command line buffers as you read through a file (it doesn't open it in one go) so it's quite effective too.

answered Jan 21 '14 at 00:15

thelastshadow

3,406
3
33
36

ok i'll check out vim. Thanks – user3213163 Jan 21 '14 at 00:16
3

if you're new to vim this is a very handy guide http://www.worldtimzone.com/res/vi.html – thelastshadow Jan 21 '14 at 00:18

simhumileco · Answer 3 · 2018-05-22T10:04:32.073

19

You can install Midnight Commander.

Debian, Ubuntu, etc.:

apt-get install mc

Red Hat, CentOS, Fedora, etc.:

yum install mc

You can start Midnight Commander from the CLI with the mc command. After that you may select and open any file in "view mode" (F3) or in "edit mode" (F4).

mc is much more efficient when opening and browsing large files than vim. I checked it myself.

If you want to watch a very large file in your favorite editor, without worrying about the limitations associated with RAM, I suggest you split the file using the split command:

split -n 8 [FILE_NAME]

The above cammand splits the file into 8 parts.

Of course, this solution will only check for some applications. Note that not every file retains its consistency after the division (e.g. XML does not). It all depends on what you want to do with the given file.

edited May 22 '18 at 10:04

answered Apr 24 '18 at 15:57

simhumileco

31,877
16
137
115

I do not understand why, someone gave me a negative opinion. Can anyone explain it to me? I tried to give in my opinion the best possible answer, touching issues that did not appear in other responses. – simhumileco Apr 25 '18 at 11:32
These methods were useful for solving real problems. – simhumileco Apr 25 '18 at 11:45
Please let me know why the ansver is downvoted? – simhumileco Aug 30 '18 at 11:55
2

Sometimes people are weird, nice hints! +1 – Hichame Yessou Nov 22 '18 at 00:10

score 4 · Answer 4 · answered Jan 21 '14 at 00:19

If viewing is anything you need, you might want to use less which should be included with your distribution. I'm frequently viewing terabyte-sized files with it. There are also the variants of zless and bzless for gzipped/bz2'ed files.

emacs should also work with large files (as an alternative to vim).

nano is another vim alternative I find easier to use for basic tasks in the default configuration. In a short test run, I could successfully view a 1GB file, however opening it took more than 30 seconds (however after that, it seems to run quite smoothly).

score 1 · Answer 5 · answered Jul 15 '19 at 14:41

1

I have just encoutered this very problem -- I need to view big log files. I tried gedit but it failed to open. Vim worked but I want to scroll. I also tried to install gglog but it does not provide the function of line wrapping and my logs are jsonlines so the lines are long and the wrapping is imporatant.

So finally, I unexpectedly discovered that it is the easiest to use a web browser. I checked both Firefox and Chromium. They work perfectly. I can scroll quite comfotably through my big logs and even search for words. So my advice is to use any decent web browser to view such files.

answered Jul 15 '19 at 14:41

JenyaKh

2,040
17
25

I don't know if it is wise to open a 4GB file in a browser. My chrome struggles if I open ~100 MB txt file. – MilMike Jun 29 '20 at 07:20
How do you open a file with web browser anyway? I have 1.7GB tsv (csv line just tab separated), so I drag and drop to Firefox and it wants to download the file – Pawel Cioch Oct 26 '21 at 15:04

score 0 · Answer 6 · answered Aug 10 '19 at 09:48

0

Natpad handles opening big files pretty well. Natpad 2.5

answered Aug 10 '19 at 09:48

Douwe Vos

1

How to view huge txt files in Linux?

6 Answers6