Quick text-editing question

I have a 15 GB XML file, and I want to find the line number of a specific line. I'm afraid to try to load it into any graphical text editor because it won't be able to load the entire thing into RAM.
Is there a text editor or text viewer that will NOT attempt to load the entire file, but will still be able to give me a line number for the line, and let me see what's around it?

Thanks in advance!
-cvp

Rather than using a text editor, if you just want to know the line number of a line and you know exactly what the line looks like, you could use grep instead:

Code:

---

grep -n "exactly what the line looks like" huge_file.xml

---

That will print the line and the line number.

Awesome, I have the line number now. Thanks!
But is there another tool I can use to view the first dozen or so lines before that line and those after that doesn't attempt to load the entire file into RAM first?

Grep to the rescue again!

To print the 1 line before the match:

Code:

---

grep -B1 -n "exactly what the line looks like" huge_file.xml

---

To print 5 lines after the match:

Code:

---

grep -A5 -n "exactly what the line looks like" huge_file.xml

---

To print 10 lines before and after the match:

Code:

---

grep -C10 -n "exactly what the line looks like" huge_file.xml

---

Hope that helps. If not, I'm not sure what editor to use but, hopefully someone else will.

Sweet.
Thank you so much!

Just for the record, the line I was looking for was line #256,453,718 out of 259,427,121 lines total. :p

If you have a line number you can also

grep -n # huge_file.xml

where # is the line number

Wow, it probably would have taken a while to find that by hand... ;)

If you are regularly working with xml files that large, you would probably find tools like grep, sed and perl very useful. There is a huge amount of information on the internet about these tools so, you should be able find good tutorials.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by vor

If you are regularly working with xml files that large, you would probably find tools like grep, sed and perl very useful. There is a huge amount of information on the internet about these tools so, you should be able find good tutorials.

---

Oh, definitely. I'm a research intern, and most of my job is teaching myself Perl as I go. :p I could've written a simple Perl script to do all of this, but I figured there was some easier way with shell commands, and lo and behold, there were and probably are several other ways to go about it.
I love being paid to learn.

Anyway, thanks again!