UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

I need to C&P the first 400,000 lines of a log file into a compressed file using Putty. I already tried emailing myself using mailx (didnt send) and used head -400000 access_log > /tmp/access_log to move the relevant lines into it's own file. And when I tried increasing the scroll back max to 400,000 and ran cat access_log, my window froze.

Anyone have a better way to do this? Thank!

You are going to need something on the windows box to do that. A program like snagit comes to mind. Plain Putty will not do what you want.

Otherwise you will have to scp/sftp/ftp the file to your desktop. You can get a free desktop UNIX that runs under windows: Cygwin
Once you install it you can scp/sftp from your windows box.

You can also get WinSCP - WinSCP :: Free SFTP and FTP client for Windows

What Operating System and version are you running?

The unix "head" command will not do 400,000 lines.


Base facts needed.

1) Is it definitely a unix format text file?
2) How big is the file? We are particularly interested if it is above 2 Gb but the size is important anyway.

Code:

ls -lad filename

3) How many lines in the file?

Code:

wc -l filename

4) Are you intending to transfer the file to a Windows platform. If so, what precise version of Windows (don't forget to mention if it is a server)?
5) What version of Putty?
6) Do you have ftp or sftp on both computers?
7) Which computer is to do the compression and what compression software will be used?
8) Reading between the lines, are you trying to mail a logfile to some external address?
9) What did you type for the mailx command? It is possible to mail sizeable attachments using mailx but it will fail if you try to send a huge mail body rather than an attachment. This whole question depends on the answer to question 1.