I was editing a large text file on Wordpad (yes, I know it’s an old program).
I was pasting a section of text in and the file would not accept the entire section of text. I found that the file had apparently reached some kind of limit - I could not add any new characters to the text.
I started a new file to check on this. I kept adding text and it again stopped accepting new text at a certain point.
I have the available memory on the hard drive so that’s not the problem.
The first text file locked at 17,113,484 bytes. The test file I made locked at 17,106,977 bytes. Not exactly the same but close enough to make me think there might be an upper limit on how large a file Wordpad can handle.
I did a little online checking and couldn’t find any conclusive answers on whether Wordpad has an upper limit on file sizes. Anyone know?
I don’t know about the latest versions, but older versions of Wordpad definitely had an upper limit for file sizes. In 2000 and XP if you tried to open a file that was too large with Wordpad, Windows would say that it couldn’t do it and would ask if you wanted to use Notepad instead.
No, I don’t have it backwards. I work at a company that makes industrial control systems, and events on the system are logged to a log file which used to normally open in wordpad. Sometimes these log files can get to be rather huge, and then wordpad won’t open them any more and we’d get a message asking to open them in notepad instead, which we did (the log files are just plain text).
So I know from personal experience that the older versions of wordpad definitely have a file size limit. Notepad may be text only, but it doesn’t have the same limit.
This wasn’t meant to be a comparison between wordpad and notepad, I was just giving details on how I knew wordpad had a limit because I have run into it many times.
We’ve changed our log files to automatically open in notepad instead of wordpad, so I don’t know if the more recent versions of wordpad still have the same limit.
I could be mistaken, but I run into the same thing you do all the time and I thought I always switch to wordpad when they are big. Everything defaults to notepad but I could have sworn that wordpad handles large files without a problem.
Ah, Wordpad. Does anyone use it? The only time I’ve used it is when, let me see. I used my late mother’s ancient computer, and it didn’t have Office installed on it.
But now that I’ve opened up Wordpad to re-acquaint myself, for doing plain writing, it could be very useful. It’s too easy to procrastinate by making my documents “pretty”. Setting it to not view the toolbars leaves a nice, clean interface.
To be fair, the OP does not specify an OS/Version for Wordpad - there have been several variants of both Wordpad and Notepad with different limitations.
Notepad was the original text editor, and was the simplest windows application imaginable - a basic multiline text box (EDIT control) in a window. Due to the limitations of x86 real mode segmentation, this text box control had a data segment that was a maximum of 64kb. This limitation stayed despite the shift to x86 protected mode in later versions of Windows.
Windows Write was a simple word processor supplied with Windows 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0/3.1. Because it was more than a EDIT control, it was not limited in the same way as Notepad. In Windows 95 this became Wordpad, using the Windows RichEdit class, and becoming a Rich Text Format (a very basic and semi-standard wordprocessing format) editor. It was never limited size-wize in the same way as Notepad, and also handled End-of-Line characters in a more flexible way than Notepad.
Once Windows was a 32-bit system (from NT 3.5 and XP for consumers), EDIT controls were no longer limited to 64kb, and Notepad was extended somewhat. Unicode support was also (sort-of) added.
I would recommend using something like Notepad++ (free) or Ultraedit for large text editing jobs. Both are much smarter about big files. Notepad still does a memory map of the text file which can lead to excessive memory consumption, smarter editors tend to not do that.
I’m with everybody else on this one - I work in IT and have to view huge web log files sometimes - when they get so big, Notepad fails to open them and recommends WordPad instead. Perhaps it varies with different Windows OSes, but my experience as an IT professional is that Notepad’s upper limit (when encountered) is uniformly less than WordPad’s upper limit.
There’s got to be a much faster way than that, even on Windows. That’s 4 log N tedious keystrokes, and I imagine the interface starts to lag on you.
On any other OS, you can do it with one call to dd, or a simple one-line while loop using cat, in under a second. I know there aren’t as many useful console tools and batch syntax sucks, but something similar has to be doable.
I can’t remember off the top of my head whether Win64 processes get 40, 44, or 48 bits of user address space, but it’s definitely not 63.
A few years ago I couldn’t figure out why my C drive was full, even though I hadn’t installed anything significant on it. Some hunting around found that my firewall program was set to record all incoming/outgoing connections into a text file. This had been going on for months if not years. Total size of the file, which would open in Wordpad, was somewhere around 12Gb. Took about 10 minutes to open. So… at least that big. This was using WinXP.
