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Text file question
mdl | Nov 7 2006
I've recently learned basic (read: remedial) command line and VIM controls and have really gotten into text files. Following up on year-old post on 43 folders (http://www.43folders.com/2005/08/17/life-inside-one-big-text-file), I'm intrigued by the idea of doing everything in big text files--dumping information into the file line by line, tagging it, and then relying on grep, sort, tr, sed and so on to manipulate and make sense of it. I can honestly say that I have never found a more powerful or flexible tool. (And just to think that it's been there all along, even when I shelled out big bucks for more complicated solutions. And don't even get me started on TeX. Yippee!) But my main question is: how big can a plain text file become before it grows too slow or unwieldy? Is there a practical limit to the size of text files? Obviously, this depends on the power of the system and the software used. I'm currently using an iBook G4 and VIM 7.0 from the command line. I'd like not to split up the file, if possible, but I suppose I may have to archive older lines at some point if it gets too slow. Any advice would be greatly appreciated! 4 Comments
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 Why not archive every year's...Submitted by brownstudy on November 7, 2006 - 1:19pm.
Why not archive every year's file and start a new one next year? Even if you didn't do this, it would take a while for the file to grow rilly big. Or archive off stuff (like rough drafts of articles) that exist outside the text file in another format. »
 But my main question is:...Submitted by jason.mcbrayer on November 8, 2006 - 1:28pm.
mdl;6549 wrote:
Many filesystems have a 2GiB limit on file size. You'd be hard pressed to fill a text file that full, of course. In practise, I can't imagine a text file so large that the standard unix text tools like grep would take any noticeable time to act on them (on a modern or even slightly obsolescent machine). You'll run into a problem organizing your text file long before that, if you ever deal with it in, e.g., a text editor rather than only with scripts and other command-line tools. Org-mode in Emacs helps quite a bit with this, though after a day of using it, the shown/hidden parts of the file can still be tangled like spaghetti, making it hard to find the next thing you want to refer to while still keeping the last thing open. »
projectsSubmitted by BMEguy on November 8, 2006 - 10:52pm.
Another option would be to use a few separate text files but access them through a text editor that handles projects (i.e. related and sometimes concatenated groups of text files.) Xcode, bbedit, or textmate are all great. The all can filter your text through command line commands. I like textmate because of the wealth of user-developed addons and the ability for me to make my own syntaxt coloring schemes. »
Thanks for all the really...Submitted by mdl on November 9, 2006 - 6:04am.
Thanks for all the really helpful advice! »
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