[plug] Extreme text editing

[J Michael Gilks]

Today I had an unfortunate experience with a large text file. A guy had 
concatenated a number of files to form a MEGA velocity file which 
unfortunately had an error on line 10,557,152.
The total file was 4.3GB on a remote NFS partition and contained 66,709,648 
lines. I eventually opened the file with VI navigated to line 10,557,152, 
changed the fifteen offending characters to spaces and closed the file after 
saving.
Unfortunately each operation took about 45 minutes. So 1.5 hours to load, edit 
and save the file.
Does anyone have any ideas about how this could be done without loading the 
entire file.
I would have simply edited the offending source file and re concatenated the 
whole lot, but the guy has gone on holiday and we are unsure exactly what he 
did.

Thanks in advance.

Love
Mike.
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