SUMMARY: VI error message

From: Jason Hargis (Jason.Hargis@PII.COM)
Date: Wed Aug 11 1993 - 07:43:43 CDT


Original question:

> Anybody ever seen this error message from "vi" before:
>
>"foo.txt" 252639 lines, 1558653 characters Tmp file too large - block overflow
>
>
>
> Why am I getting this error message? I have plenty of tmp
> space, and I have edited files MUCH larger then this one before.
>
>

Many persons responded with "check /var/tmp size". However this was
NOT the problem, the only responses that sounded correct were these:
..
From: Brian Dickson <trigraph!briand>

It has nothing to do with /tmp space, it has to do with the fact that vi has its
roots in very early versions of ed, back when UNIX ran on PDP's. Some number or
another is overflowing, and vi is letting you know that it doesn't exactly know
how to deal with it -- probably line numbers, so you may have edited larger
files in terms of bytes, but not lines, or vice versa.

At any rate, you can probably edit the file, but I wouldn't count on the
results. Use split (or similar tool) to break the file into smaller chunks,
and edit them, and join the results with cat when you are done.

...
Thanks Brian!

AND

...
From: stern@sunne.East.Sun.COM (Hal Stern - NE Area Systems Engineer)

there's probably one long line that's too long for vi to
handle

--hal

Thanks Hal!

                                Thanks to all who responded,

                                        Jason Hargis



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:08:06 CDT