[Alpine-info] Problem with Alpine - mbox larger than 2GB

[Mike Miller]

On Wed, 29 Sep 2010, Vincent Poy wrote:


> Does anyone know what might be wrong and is there any other command 

> based mail clients or tools I can use to get the file to 3x 1GB files 

> but with the files, it will actually end at the end of a message instead 

> of chopping it off partially?  Thanks!



I'd get a list of the line numbers where messages begin by using grep like 
this:

grep -nE '^From ' vince.old > vince_lines.txt &

That will take a little while.  This would be a better string to match, 
but slower and not much better:

^From \S+\s+\S+\s+\S+\s+\d+\s+\d+:\d+:\d+\s+\d+

Anyway, you can then decide where to cut up the file.  Suppose you want to 
make the cuts at the messages beginning at lines 10000000 and 20000000, 
then you'd do this:

head -9999999 vince.old > vince.1 &
tail -n+10000000 vince.old | head -19999999 > vince.2 &
tail -n+20000000 vince.old > vince.3 &

You would have to have enough disk space for this, of course.  I think 
these GNU utils are up to the task -- I have used them on files as large 
as 42 GB (not mbox files!), but on a 64-bit Linux box.

Mike