Re: cut fails with "cut: memory exhausted" when taking a large slice

[Jim Meyering]

Mordy Ovits <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Wednesday 21 April 2004 03:35 pm, Jim Meyering wrote:
>> If you want to continue using cut, you'll have better
>> luck with the latest:
>>
>>   ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.2.1.tar.gz
>>   ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.2.1.tar.bz2
>
> Doesn't work.
>
> address@hidden ~]$ ls -l ~/bigfile
> -rw-r--r--    1 movits   movits   9075738624 Apr 21 12:39 /home/movits/bigfile
>
> address@hidden ~]$ cut -b 1-412569600 ~/bigfile > firstchunk
>
> cut never stops.  The file 'firstchunk' just gets bigger and bigger.

Hmm... I'll bet your data is not all on one line.
cut is a line-oriented tool, and it tries to read each
line in its entirety into memory, so it's probably not
the tool you want, after all.  As I said, dd should work
better.