[RLUG] quick question

[Brian Chrisman]

I kind of doubt that there's anything else you can do.  I think you'd 
have to have some program that manipulates the the filesystem inodes to 
do what you want.  Generally you are limited to the system call 
interface like 'open', 'read', 'write', 'truncate'.. and all that stuff.
You could certainly write null characters over the first 300 lines, but 
if that doesn't do what you want, I'm not certain what else will, 
barring some sort of hacky work with a filesystem debugger tool.

You could also have some part of your program which maintains a current 
offset into the file, and automatically does a 'seek' to that position 
when you next run it... it'd be a dirty hack, but it might be what you 
want.  Then you'd have to write your code in some full programming 
language, not sed.

-Brian


Grant Kelly wrote:
> Alright unix fans, who can answer this the best?
>
> I have a text file, it's about 2.3 GB. I need to delete the first 300
> lines, and I don't want to have to load the entire thing into an
> editor.
>
> I'm trying `sed '1,300d' inputfile > output file`  but it's taking a
> long time (and space) to output everything to the new file.
>
> There has got to be a better way, a way that can do this in-place...
>
>
> Grant
>
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