Editing long text file

Good morning all, I have a machine running IRIX and I need to edit a text file on the terminal that is literally thousands of lines. Does anyone know the most efficient way to edit portions of files like these? Obviously simply using the vi command isn't going to work since I get a too many lines error. Thanks a lot, James

Usually "thousands" of lines is not a problem for vi . Maybe you have simply not enough space in the right place: upon start vi creates a (temporary) working copy of the file it works on, usually in /var/tmp . If this is the problem you can either increase the filesystem in size or configure vi to use another location for its temporary files. How this is done depends on your vi implementation, but the man page will surely help.

If indeed vi is not working for you you might consider sed , if the changes you intend to make can be automated.

I hope this helps.

bakunin