Re: recover file after crash

[David Combs]

In article <mailman.18392.1359236878.855.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>,
Ludwig, Mark <ludwig.mark@siemens.com> wrote:
>> From: Eli Zaretskii
>> Sent: Saturday, January 26, 2013 4:40 AM
>> 
>> > From: "Ludwig, Mark" <ludwig.mark@siemens.com>
>> > Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2013 20:56:47 +0000
>> >
>> > I think I thoroughly documented this in Bug # 9589
>> > (http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=9589) for the
>> > developers to consider, which see.
>> 
>> Assuming the OP has such long lines, yes.  But that would be unusual
>> in a file that is being read in any kind of overview mode, because
>> those normally are for human consumption, so long lines are unlikely
>> to appear in them.
>
>Agreed, this is not an every-day occurrence.
>
>In my case, it is because log files I receive from customers sometimes
>have a huge number of NUL bytes preceding the readable content.  This
>leading, extremely-long line gets in the way of reasonable
>responsiveness.
>
>I also confess that I have not been keeping up with the current trends
>in Emacs development.  Back when I started using EMACS [sic], it was
>an excellent binary editor.  Apparently this is not a current
>requirement, because it clearly is no longer useful for same.  Side
>question: is there a GNU tool designed for editing binary files?
>
>Cheers,
>Mark
>

About all those nulls that make lines so long, couldn't you run
the file through sed or some super-short c-program or even perl
first, and delete (ie ignore) all those nulls then?

David