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Limit on amount of lines less can handle

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# 1  
Old 11-26-2013
Limit on amount of lines less can handle
Is there a limit on the amount of lines less can handle? I grepped for something that is pretty common in my files so I tried to filter it through less so it was easier to look at. So I then used a redirect ">" to create a file. It created a file that was 103K long. So that makes me think there is a limit on the amount of lines less can handle.
# 2  
Old 11-26-2013
Not sure I understand. Do you get an error msg? What does not work?
# 3  
Old 11-26-2013
Practically speaking, less is limited to the hundreds of megabytes on a 32-bit system.

But I don't think you can redirect less' output with > that way. It is an interactive application and kind of expects to be talking to a human via terminal, not a pipe, not a file.
Try fold -s to wrap lines.
Last edited by Corona688; 11-26-2013 at 11:44 AM..
# 4  
Old 11-26-2013
Quote:
Originally Posted by RudiC
Not sure I understand. Do you get an error msg? What does not work?
Sorry I didn't explain myself very well. I did this and less didn't work. So as I said above I think there is a limit on the amount of lines less can handle.

Code:
grep -riI 'word' /home/bob 2>/dev/null | grep less

Then I used this command to create the file. The file was 103K long.

Code:
grep -riI 'word' /home/bob 2>/dev/null > file

Quote:
Originally Posted by Corona688
Practically speaking, less is limited to the hundreds of megabytes on a 32-bit system.

But I don't think you can redirect less' output with > that way. It is an interactive application and kind of expects to be talking to a human via terminal, not a pipe, not a file.
Try fold -s to wrap lines.
These were the commands I used.

Code:
grep -riI 'word' /home/bob 2>/dev/null | grep less

Code:
grep -riI 'word' /home/bob 2>/dev/null > file

The file was 1.5 GB. I assume that is the reason less wouldn't work?
# 5  
Old 11-26-2013
You didn't use less. You looked for the string "less" using grep. Try changing:
Code:
grep -riI 'word' /home/bob 2>/dev/null | grep less

to:
Code:
grep -riI 'word' /home/bob 2>/dev/null | less

This User Gave Thanks to Don Cragun For This Post:
cokedude
# 6  
Old 11-26-2013
Quote:
Originally Posted by Don Cragun
You didn't use less. You looked for the string "less" using grep. Try changing:
Code:
grep -riI 'word' /home/bob 2>/dev/null | grep less

to:
Code:
grep -riI 'word' /home/bob 2>/dev/null | less

Thank you. I wasn't reading carefully.
# 7  
Old 11-26-2013
You can speed up grep by turning off the regex engine, and simply doing a literal pattern search. grep -F specifies a fixed-string search as opposed to a regex search. The performance improvement can be dramatic for a bunch of huge text files.
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