Re: pg_dump fundenental question

"less" is much better for opening huge text files in *nix for reading.

On 07/05/16 15:13, Christofer C. Bell wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 5, 2016 at 3:17 PM, Paul Linehan <linehanp@tcd.ie
> <mailto:linehanp@tcd.ie>> wrote:
>
>     > a good point, but I would prefer NOT to open a 324GB backup file in a text
>     > editor. I can however cat/less/head/tail the file in Linux.
>
>     Use vi (or flavour thereof) - it doesn't load the entire file in
>     order to
>     read the contents of lines 1 - 100 (say).
>
>
> What Paul says is very true, but if you are doing this, do be cognizant
> of where your fingers are.  If you press any key that will put vi into
> edit mode, it will then make a copy of the file for backup purposes.
> Your 324GB file will become 648GB of disk usage and you'll have to wait
> while the backup copy is written out to disk.  It will not load the
> whole file into memory (ever) nor will it make a copy of the file as
> long as you stay in command mode.
>
> If you want to use vi or equivalent for viewing the file without any
> danger of accidentally putting the editor into edit mode (and thus
> triggering the backup copy), you may want to invoke vi as "view(1)".
> This opens vi read-only and you'll be able to use vi style hotkeys for
> navigation.
>
>
>     Paul...
>
>
> Chris
>
> "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent
> the Universe." -- Carl Sagan
>
>