I just discovered something unexpected in vi (vim actually). Here's the situation:
Inside a single bash shell (RH Enterprise 4), I found that you can open a vi session on a file, use yy to yank some lines, close the vi session, vi a different file, and paste the yanked lines into it.
The surprise came when I discovered that regardless of how many lines you yank, only the first 50 lines can be pasted into the second file. It's great to be able to yank & paste between files, but why would you want to cap the number of lines at 50?
And now for a more practical question; is the 50 line limit hard coded into a binary somewhere? Can you set the number higher and if so, where?

WN

Oh, I forgot to include another detail:
If you vi both files with the same command, then the 50 line limit doesn't come into effect and you can paste as many lines into the second file as you want.

50 lines may be a hard-coded default, but vim should allow you to override that default.

yy will yank the current line; 55yy should yank the current line plus the next 54 lines.

I looked at source and even though I didn't get into the details my impression is that 50 is hardcoded magic number. When you do "yy" lines are copied into the buffer named `"'(in some places of Vim help they also called "registers"). When you close vim session the current state is stored in ~/.viminfo, and it looks like that only 50 lines are copied from the RAM. You could examine this file for you educational pleasure. The relevant source which does the job is in .../vim71/ops.c and option.c . I didn't see the way to overwrite the default.

Thanks for the replies!
Since I could work around it already, "educational pleasure" was pretty much the only reason I asked anyway. Isn't it amazing the strange (and often useless) things that geeks like me can get curious about?

If there is something we could know about there is no reason we should not.