Many system admins types have run into cases where log files can get extremely large (think gigabytes) over time. Notepad has a hard enough time opening a 10 MB file and other popular Notepad replacements such as Notepad++, while faster than Notepad, can still take a fair amount of time to open an extremely large file. Enter the appropriately named tool: Large Text File Viewer.
- This program was designed for viewing large (>1GB) text files.
- It uses little memory and is able to open a gigabyte file instantly.
- Background file indexing makes browsing even faster.
- It opens files that are currently being written by other programs, and automatically checks and reads the files if new contents have been appended.
- For CSV (Comma Separated Value) files, when the user hovers the mouse over any field in the file, a hint automatically appears with the field name.
Just by reading the features (there are more than what is listed above), you can tell this was designed specifically with log files in mind.
I’ve had the need more times than one to dig through mail logs attempting to find why a single message was not delivered and on a server with over 800 mailboxes the daily log files are easily 10+ MB per day. Notepad++ handles them fine but takes about 20-30 seconds to open the file. Using this tool, the file opens up right away and there is no time wasted looking at the hourglass.
Large Text File Viewer is portable and free, so system admin types should really pay attention to this one.
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OMG !! a one gig text file ? I don’t think I have ever seen one how long would it take to create this ?
Baretail is another good tool for opening enormous text files. Also it’s an ideal tool for active log files because it can follow the “tail” of the document.
Not nearly as long as you might think… A program can execute a block of code incredibly quickly. If that block of code happens to be a loop continually writing to a log file, maybe due to an error state, then the logs can get very large, very quickly.