Extarct specific records from wide file

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I have a file which is 5 million records. And each records has 412 fields has delimited by "|". So that makes each records to be 2923 bytes long. I wanted to extract specific records like top 100 or 2500 - 5000, 50001 - 10000 etc. from this file.

I tried using head command for top 100 records, but since the records being so wide I get incorrect results. I can't even "vi" this file. I get the message "line too long". I had to use vim editor to view the file.

I was wondering we could use awk, but awk has a limitation of 199 fields. Since this records being pretty wide, how could we acheive this in unix.

Thanks in advance.
AC

2

2048 is a common line limit. What os are you using? You might try sed... see if this will print the first 100 lines:
sed 101q < bigfile