[plug] Extreme text editing

[James Devenish]

In message <200310081700.38745.mike at gilks1.com>
on Wed, Oct 08, 2003 at 05:00:38PM +0800, J Michael Gilks wrote:
> Thanks to everyone who has replied on this thread. It seems to be a problem 
> with no quick solution, I am not yet brave enough to use dd without having an 
> original copy, but it is interesting to get other peoples slant on what to 
> do.

I'm not quite sure how vim or perl or split have any more or less
intrinsic safety than dd in this situation, but anyway...with dd you
would be free to copy a (say) 100Mb portion out of the middle of the
file *twice* (one for backup and one for editing). Then, edit the
excerpt and use dd to merge the edited excerpt back into the original.
If it's not right, use dd to merge the unedited excerpt back into the
original. Obviously this is complicated if the file is in use, but I
don't know how vim gets around that, either.


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