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Text editor to open big (giant, huge, large) text files

E.g. Notepad++ complains that the file is too big.

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Joachim
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    Do you really need to edit such huge text file? One year is about 31.3 Mega seconds. If you can read 10 characters per second and can work for reading 24 hours per day, 365deys per year, you may need about 5 years to read 1.5GB text. Yes, you will win the GUINESS world record if you can. I recommend you to consider to use other kind of tools. – Fumu 7 Oct 20 '14 at 08:05
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    I did not ask for your opinion or second guess me about my motives, just a serious answer to a serious question. I am not gonna read the whole file, just search it and read adjacent lines. – Joachim Oct 21 '14 at 02:05

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You'd better to Use grep or sed to extract lines of your interest first.

If you want to extract 10 adjacent lines of the line which contains "Joachim", following command may work. You may see 11 liens of text, 5 lines before the line of Joachim, the line of Joachime and 5 lines after the line of Joachim on the console. 

grep -5 -n Joachim filename_of_your_gigabyte_data

If you want to read by editor instead of console message, save them in a file as follows.

grep -5 -n Joachim filename_of_your_gigabyte_data > output_file_name

Then use your favorite editor to open file.

Read_every_data type applications is not suitable to handle Gigabyte data in the purpose of reading a part only.

Fumu 7
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  • Thank you Fumu 7! I think though that there must exist some smart solution to read data partially from the hard drive into internal memory when needed. From http://stackoverflow.com/questions/159521/text-editor-to-open-big-giant-huge-large-text-files it seems like 010 Editor is such an editor. – Joachim Oct 27 '14 at 02:33