We have RHEL 5.x in our production setup. There is a 6 GB file which I want to inspect to find a certain string but it is not able to find the string as the vim seems to be hanging for more than 1 hr. Please advice how this searching of a string in a big file can be done. I copied the file into a windows system but Microsoft Wordpad or Microsoft Word is failing to open the file. Or, if there is a tool to open large files in Windows as an alternate would also help.

I hope my query is clear that how to search a string in a big file using vim editor.

Please revert with the reply to my query.

Regards

The simplest tool for what you describe is grep

grep has many options, worth reading its manpage

but simply
6gb is a large file, it is going to take some time

is it a log?

https://access.redhat.com/documentat...-locating.html

that is for rhel 6, hunt for specifics on 5 if required

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