UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

How do I search through a file that is so large (over 1GB) and find out exactly on what the exact pattern is found. I've used grep and know the line exist but what it returns is not complete because there are blobs in the data and there are control characters, etc and part of the data may beyond 2048 characters limit in vi...

If I can figure out exactly what line number the pattern is found in this large file I can at least attempt to do a head|tail|more combinations or split it correctly...

I'd like to find it using vi editor but the file's too large..

Thanks.
Gian

"blobs in the data" .... I don't believe that I've encountered that particular complaint before. But I can help with the rest.

grep has a -n option to print line numbers. But you really should switch to sed. sed can process data rather quickly. It can handle large files well. And it has plenty of power. Here are a few examples:

sed -n '/<pattern>/p' < datafile
sed -n '/<pattern>/=' < datafile
sed -n /<pattern>/{ =;p;}' < datafile
sed -n 25p < datafile
sed -n 25,30p < datafile

The first one displays the lines that match the pattern.
The second displays the line numbers of the matches.
The third one does both, using a single pass though the file.
Then we print line 25, then lines 25 through 30.

And you can use the l command (letter l) instead of the p command. The l command will render the line readable if it has special characters or is very long.

Thank you!!! This is perfect.