Motorola, System V, vi question

[Joe Boykin]

In article <2691 at usceast.UUCP> dean at usceast.UUCP (Dean Karres) writes:
>Hi,
>  I am running release 3, version 4 of Motorola's System V. I have
>recently had occasion to edit a reasonably large ascii text file
>(540Kb +) and recieved the message "Tmp file too large". I am positive
>that there is sufficient room in /tmp for vi to use (I have generated
>the message with /tmp as a part of the / filesystem and with /tmp as
>its own filesystem). Is there an upper limit to the size of a file
>that vi can deal with? Should there be? If the answer to any of these
>questions is "no" then what can I do to fix it?

The problem is not that you have run out of space in /tmp, but that VI
has a compile-time limit on the maximum size the temporary file it uses
can be.  Th way VI works is to read the entire file you are using into
a temporary file.  Some additional information is also kept in the
file.  Whenever you change the file both the original text and the new
text is kept; unfortunately, the temporary file is never garbage
collected.

The default for non-VMUNIX is the ability to edit about a 256KB file;
sometimes this is upped to 512KB.  Under VMUNIX, there is a max, but
you won't reach it.

You said you were running Motorola's System V, but you didn't say on
what kind of hardware.  If you are running on a system with a small
address space, than maybe you're editing a file as big as you can given
the machine.  If you're using a system with a large address space, or
one with virtual memory, there is no reason why the distributor should
pawn off a copy of VI with a 256/512KB file size limit.  Unfortunately
there is no way you can "fix" this without the sources.  If you have
them, turn on VMUNIX.  If not, complain to Motorola (or whoever sold
you the system).

----

Joe Boykin
Encore Computer Corp
Chairman, IEEE Computer Societies
    Technical Committee on Operating Systems

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