Re: help editing huge files in emacs

[Stefan Monnier]

> How can I edit a selected number of lines in a 4GB file in Emacs
> without open the whole file? Is it possible?

`insert-file-contents' takes two integer parameters BEG and END to allow
getting only part of a file into a buffer.  The corresponding `write-region'
takes an APPEND parameter which can be an integer indicating at which
position in the file the text should be written.

With those two elisp functions, you can read&write parts of files, so you
can do what you want.  But it requires some coding on top of that to make it
really usable (probably some kind of special major or minor mode, or maybe
a file-name-handler) and I don't know of any package that does that.


        Stefan