Re: Maximum buffer size exceeded

[Kin Cho]

Harish Narayanan <harish@gamebox.net> writes:

> I've been trying to open a large file (208 MB) but I receive the
> error "Maximum buffer size exceeded" and Emacs fails to open the
> file. This is Emacs 21.2.1 on a Redhat GNU/Linux 9 box.
> 
> I tried searching in the archives, and noticed this has been
> asked before, but the responses don't seem encouraging. Is there
> a way of working around this that's arisen in the recent past?

Use head/tail/dd to extract the small part of the file you want
to edit, edit that small file, then use cat/head/tail/dd to put
it back into your original file.

Let's say you want to edit the last line of the file 208MB, which
is 1 million lines long:

tail -1 208MB > foo
emacs foo
(head -999999 208MB; cat foo) > new-208MB

-kin