Shell Programming and Scripting

I'm using less to find terms in a 6 gb text file in OS X in the terminal. When I first search for the patter, it finds it, scrolls the document to the correct location, and highlights it. But when I search again, the document scrolls to a new further location (I'm assuming it's found the pattern again), but the term is nowhere to be seen. Sometimes if I scroll up or down using the arrow keys, it will be close to where I am, but usually not.

Anyone come across this before?

Is your OS 32 bit or 64 bit ?

Is your version of "less" command 32 or 64 bit ?
you can check it with the file command :

Code:

file /usr/bin/less
/usr/bin/less:  ELF 32-bit MSB executable SPARC Version 1, dynamically linked, stripped

2^32 = 4294967296
so above 4Gb if your OS and or the less command is 32 bit try to handle bigfiles you may encounter problems...

Hi,
I'm running Snow Leopard, which is 64 bit.
For the less version:

/usr/bin/less: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures
/usr/bin/less (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
/usr/bin/less (for architecture i386): Mach-O executable i386

So..I'm not sure which version is running when I simply using the less command. Would the "less" command know to run in 64 bit mode if my OS is 64bit? Is there a way to force it?

I'll test by chopping the file in 2 and see if that affects my issue. Will let you know if that works out.

Thanks again.

---------- Post updated at 11:08 PM ---------- Previous update was at 02:44 PM ----------

Thanks ctsgnb! The large size seemed to be the issue. Now that the file is split into a gig each, less searching is working as expected!

Gareth