Shell Programming and Scripting

version info :
vi availabe with RHEL 5.4
I have a text file with 10,000 lines. I want to copy lines from 5000th line to 7000th and redirect to a file. Any idea how I can do this?

Note:
The above scenario is just an example. In my actual requirement, the file has 14 million lines and I want to copy 2000 lines after the 12th million line

BTW.I've just realised that the vi editor we use in RHEL is actually VIM

Code:

 
$ cat /etc/redhat-release
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.4 (Tikanga)
$
$ which vi
/bin/vi

Sorry, but you really want do this with vi? Why?
If you use sed I can help you.
Let me know.

Ok. How can I do this with sed or any other utility?

Not sure how sed will react on a 14 million line file but 10k lines should be no problem:

Code:

sed -ne '5000,7000p' /path/to/input >/path/to/output

If sed chokes on it perl may be a better choice.

q - Quit the sed script and avoid further processing

Code:

sed -ne '5000,7000{p;7000q;}' /path/to/input >/path/to/output

sed would never choke on this task, no matter how many lines. Even billions of lines. sed just reads one line at a time, so the number of lines is totally not an issue. If I'm wrong about this, I'd like to be educated.

Here is similar (but tad simpler) solution to previous valid solution posted:

Code:

sed -n "5000,7000 p; 7000 q" infile