RE: [SLUG] Vi is for newbies

[Jill Rowling <Rowling@nospam.ali.com.au>]

I thought ed and vi also only read in parts of the file, not the whole lot
at once.

man ed / vi on Linux (RH 6.0) doesn't say much about the limitations (do
later ones?)
Note that ed uses a buffer in /tmp/ed.* and vi uses local temp files... so
something is cached.

The documentation on the Solaris version suggests you need to support large
files if your file is larger than 2GB.
That should be adequate for most people.
It also suggests that lines are limited to 256 characters in length and the
total number of lines is limited to user memory (one machine word per line)
(read: swap space).
It's probably the same on Linux.

A long time ago there was a version of ed on CP/M and it certainly did not
load everything into memory; it had a caching scheme based on the current
block you were editing. The maximum file size was the whole disk (but that
was < 40 MB then).

Regards,

Jill.

___________________________________________
Jill Rowling
Senior Design Engineer & Unix System Administrator
Electronic Engineering Department, Aristocrat Technologies
3rd Floor, 77 Dunning Ave Rosebery NSW 2018
Phone:	(02) 9697-4484		Fax:	(02) 9663-1412
Email:	rowling@nospam.ali.com.au

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Jamie Honan [SMTP:jhonan@nospam.optushome.com.au]
> A line struck me from the affirmative to the effect that
> emacs only works on part of your file at once, doesn't neccessarily
> read the whole thing in memory. I didn't know that about emacs, it's
> certainly something to keep in mind.
> 
> 
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