[Gllug] Opening a large text file in a text editor

[Chris Ebenezer]

On 5/6/06, Richard Jones <rich at annexia.org> wrote:
> On Sat, May 06, 2006 at 09:15:38AM -0400, Mark Preston wrote:
> > I've got an old text file which is 169Mb in size which contains my old
> > email "inbox".
> > I have tried to open it with emacs and other text editors, but I get
> > "maximum buffer size exceeded" messages.
>
> I'm rather surprised that emacs won't open it.
>

Emacs uses an internal type to index its position in each buffer, and
as pre emacs 22 this was limited to 128MB, as of emacs22 it should be
256MB (both figures are for 32 bit machines) - you can see the local
value using M-h v most-positive-fixnum

Xemacs is a bit different - and I believe it's limit is around 1GB.

I guess it's an argument for upgrading to a 64bit machine, or using
some other mail backend format, or something.

--
chris
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