Re: Quick fix + reliable editor?

[David Stern <dstern@u.washington.edu>]

On Wed, 23 Dec 1998 13:15:37 GMT, Martin Wheeler wrote:
> 
> Can anyone help me with a quick fix?
> 
> For various inane reasons, I'm demonstrating the possibility of using
> multiple, mutually-inclusive mail-readers under Linux -- mail, mailx, elm,
> pine, mutt, tkmail, exmh, etc.
> 
> So far, so good; except that yesterday I demonstrated exmh without first
> making a copy of my mailbox file (/var/spool/mail/<user>). So exmh has now
> taken 2500+ mail messages and converted them into separate files, which I
> somehow very quickly have to get back into a monobloc form in mailbox
> readable format (i.e chained together with an extra <cr> added between
> each -- and I don't know of any way to do this using cat or more/less).
> Anyome got a handy sed/awk/perl script to do this; or any any other
> quick-fix suggestion?

I think formail (from procmail) breaks it up, I don't know what puts it 
back together.  Maybe you could use a for loop.

$ ls > filelist
$ touch newfile

------------------------
#!/bin/bash
for i in `cat filelist`
  do
    cat $i >> newfile
    echo "<cr>" >> newfile
  done
-----------------------

I tested this and it worked, but I don't have any mailbox format to 
compare against.  I'm sure more artful code exists.

> Second query (related; but not urgent): does anyone know of a _known_
> reliable large-file text editor?  One which will handle 10, 15, 25 Mb text
> files without hiccup, doing search-&-replace on the whole file without
> barfing, screwing up the file, etc.?  (Something like Programmer's File
> Editor, but running under Linux).  It must be known to be reliable -- i.e.
> tried and trusted in real-life experience, not just "this should do the
> job".  (I've been caught like that before! :(

XEmacs has worked pretty well for me.  I haven't done a lot of testing 
with files of that size, although I have done some.  I've also used vi 
and even pico on files of that size, and they also worked well.  I 
think PFE emulates Brief, and I think XEmacs (and Emacs) has Brief 
emulation as well.

-- 
David
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                                               dstern@u.washington.edu