[plug] Extreme text editing

[J Michael Gilks]

On Wed, 8 Oct 2003 05:06 pm, James Devenish wrote:
>
> 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.
>
No guts, no glory. I have now tried this successfully with a couple of test 
files and it works.
Never thought of dd like this before, just for partitions and images was my 
understanding until I read the info page, which was much more enlightening 
than the man page I had been reading. Probably just the style and less terse 
maybe.
As to the intrinsic safety, could be a matter of no fear of the unknown when 
using the old ways I am used to. My fear of dd will diminish in time too.
Anyway, thanks very much for the tip, it could be very handy in future, 
although my finger still shakes when I hit the enter key.
Getting old. would like a comfort zone somewhere, sometime.

Love
Mike.
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