I need a really good text manipulation tool, preferably shareware.

[crispini]

It has to be able to handle a GIANT text file.

Anyone got any recommendations?

[DS1]

1. The irrationally named "Large Text Viewer"

:7 :7 :7

opens 2 gig log files just fine

http://www.topshareware.com/Large-Text-File-Viewer-download-11000.htm

sadly, it's read only

[crispini]

2. Can I get it to trim off the first N characters of each line?

That's all I really need to do, and it's making me nuts that I can't do this. Unfortunately I've never been much of a coder but I know perfectly well how simple this is to code. It's just, the damn file is huge, and nothing I have seems to be able to do this anyway.

[DS1]

4. excel maybe?

textpad might help. it's not a typical thing to do

[crispini]

6. Excel is taking the first column and turning into a numeric

Leading zero. Which I NEED TO KEEP, DAMN IT.

I tried it to force keeping that column as text, but then it has a leading space which I DON'T need.

Grrrrrr. Damn early voting files.

[Twillig]

3. If you got a Mac, then it's TextWrangler for you.

It's free. It's a beast.

http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/

[crispini]

5. Ugh. No.

this is driving me nuts, it would take about 20 minutes to write an EXE to do this -- if I were any kind of coder anymore, which I'm really not. Ha.