[Nottingham] newbie Hi!

[Graeme Fowler]

On Sun, 2006-01-08 at 11:31 +0000, Andy Davidson wrote:
> Nonono, opening large files in less is no problem at all, its people who 
> open large files in vi(m) when they want to do paging instead of editing 
> that cause me grief.  And they do.  Sheesh.

...large web or mail log files... opened in vi(m)... thrash swap like no
tomorrow, and then to compound the problem (bear in mind that Andy and I
have seen this in the same place!) people *insist* on finishing off with
":wq".

Thus potentially trashing anything appended to the file in the time it's
been open for reading - even if the application is clever enough to say
"file changed while editing! do you want to write to disk?"... people
will inevitably say "yes" on odd occasions.

Best case is loss of appended data, worst case is a race condition which
wipes out the whole file.

A little knowledge, a dangerous thing :)

G