I'm trying to strip out the header line of a large csv file. But the first methods I tried (using tail and awk) work so slowly compared to copying the entire file!
So, just for fun, let's try a few silly but potentially didactically interesting methods for copying files.
Using cp:
$ time cp my_big_file.csv copy_of_my_big_file.csv
real 0m2.208s
user 0m0.002s
sys 0m2.171s
Using tail:
$ time tail -n+1 my_big_file.csv > copy_of_my_big_file.csv
real 0m44.506s
user 0m37.521s
sys 0m3.107s
Using awk:
$ time awk '{if (NR!=0) {print}}' my_big_file.csv > copy_of_my_big_file.csv
real 0m24.951s
user 0m20.336s
sys 0m2.869s
What accounts for such large discrepancies between using tail vs cp vs awk?
cp is copying fs block by block, without asking itself question. Most thing are happening at kernel level.
tail is reading line by line and does some filtering to recreate a file line by line. Of course, the fs will bufferize in the read and write case, but it is less efficient, cause have to cross several layers (kernel-user space), back and forth
Related
I'm trying to display the output of an AWS lambda that is being captured in a temporary text file, and I want to remove that file as I display its contents. Right now I'm doing:
... && cat output.json && rm output.json
Is there a clever way to combine those last two commands into one command? My goal is to make the full combined command string as short as possible.
For cases where
it is possible to control the name of the temporary text file.
If file is not used by other code
Possible to pass "/dev/stdout" as the.name of the output
Regarding portability: see stack exchange how portable ... /dev/stdout
POSIX 7 says they are extensions.
Base Definitions,
Section 2.1.1 Requirements:
The system may provide non-standard extensions. These are features not required by POSIX.1-2008 and may include, but are not limited to:
[...]
• Additional character special files with special properties (for example, /dev/stdin, /dev/stdout, and /dev/stderr)
Using the mandatory supported /dev/tty will force output into “current” terminal, making it impossible to pipe the output of the whole command into different program (or log file), or to use the program when there is no connected terminals (cron job, or other automation tools)
No, you cannot easily remove the lines of a file while displaying them. It would be highly inefficient as it would require removing characters from the beginning of a file each time you read a line. Current filesystems are pretty good at truncating lines at the end of a file, but not at the beginning.
A simple but extremely slow method would look like this:
while [ -s output.json ]
do
head -1 output.json
sed -i 1d output.json
done
While this algorithm is plain and simple, you should know that each time you remove the first line with sed -i 1d it will copy the whole content of the file but the first line into a temporary file, resulting in approximately 0.5*n² lines written in total (where n is the number of lines in your file).
In theory you could avoid this by do something like that:
while [ -s output.json ]
do
line=$(head -1 output.json)
printf -- '%s\n' "$line"
fallocate -c -o 0 -l $((${#len}+1)) output.json
done
But this does not account for variable newline characters (namely DOS-formatted newlines) and fallocate does not always work on xfs, among other issues.
Since you are trying to consume a file alongside its creation without leaving a trace of its existence on disk, you are essentially asking for a pipe functionality. In my opinion you should look into how your output.json file is produced and hopefully you can pipe it to a script of your own.
We have a tool for cutting adaptors https://github.com/vsbuffalo/scythe/blob/master/README.md and we wanted it to be used on all the files in the raw folder and make an output of each file separately as OUT+File Name.
Something is wrong with this script I wrote, because it doesn't take each file separately, and the whole thing doesn't work properly. It's gonna generateing empty file named OUT+files
Expected operation will looks:
take file1, use scythe on it, write output as OUTfile1
take file2 etc.
#!/bin/bash
FILES=/home/dave/raw/*
for f in $FILES
do
echo "Processing the $f file..."
/home/deve/scythe/scythe -a /home/dev/scythe/illumina_adapters.fa -o "OUT"+$f $f
done
Additionally, I noticed (testing for a single file) that the script uses only one core out of 130 available. Is there any way to improve it?
There is no string concatenation operator in shell. Use juxtaposition instead; it's "OUT$f", not "OUT"+$f.
I have a ~300 GB zipped vcf file (.vcf.gz) which contains the genomes of about 700 dogs. I am only interested in a few of these dogs and I do not have enough space to unzip the whole file at this time, although I am in the process of getting a computer to do this. Is it possible to unzip only parts of the file to begin testing my scripts?
I am trying to a specific SNP at a position on a subset of the samples. I have tried using bcftools to no avail: (If anyone can identify what went wrong with that I would also really appreciate it. I created an empty file for the output (722g.990.SNP.INDEL.chrAll.vcf.bgz) but it returns the following error)
bcftools view -f PASS --threads 8 -r chr9:55252802-55252810 -o 722g.990.SNP.INDEL.chrAll.vcf.gz -O z 722g.990.SNP.INDEL.chrAll.vcf.bgz
The output type "722g.990.SNP.INDEL.chrAll.vcf.bgz" not recognised
I am planning on trying awk, but need to unzip the file first. Is it possible to partially unzip it so I can try this?
Double check your command line for bcftools view.
The error message 'The output type "something" is not recognized' is printed by bcftools when you specify an invalid value for the -O (upper-case O) command line option like this -O something. Based on the error message you are getting it seems that you might have put the file name there.
Check that you don't have your input and output file names the wrong way around in your command. Note that the -o (lower-case o) command line option specifies the output file name, and the file name at the end of the command line is the input file name.
Also, you write that you created an empty file for the output. You don't need to do that, bcftools will create the output file.
I don't have that much experience with bcftools but generically If you want to to use awk to manipulate a gzipped file you can pipe to it so as to only unzip the file as needed, you can also pipe the result directly through gzip so it too is compressed e.g.
gzip -cd largeFile.vcf.gz | awk '{ <some awk> }' | gzip -c > newfile.txt.gz
Also zcat is an alias for gzip -cd, -c is input/output to standard out, -d is decompress.
As a side note if you are trying to perform operations on just a part of a large file you may also find the excellent tool less useful it can be used to view your large file loading only the needed parts, the -S option is particularly useful for wide formats with many columns as it stops line wrapping, as is -N for showing line numbers.
less -S largefile.vcf.gz
quit the view with q and g takes you to the top of the file.
I have large file with size of 130GB.
# ls -lrth
-rw-------. 1 root root 129G Apr 20 04:25 syslog.log
So I need to reduce file size by deleting line which starts with "Nov 2" , So I have given the following command,
sed -i '/Nov 2/d' syslog.log
So I can't edit file using VIM editor also.
When I trigger SED command , its creating backup file also. But I don't have much space in root. Please try to give alternate solution to delete particular line from this file without increasing space in server.
It does not create a real backup file. sed is a stream editor. When applied to a file with option -i it will stream that file through the sed process, write the output to a new file (a temporary one), when everything is done, it will rename the new file to the original name.
(There are options to create backup files also, but you didn't give them, so I won't mention that further.)
In your case you have a very large file and don't want to create any copy, however temporary. For this you need to open the file for reading and writing at the same time, then your sed process can overwrite the original. After this, you will have to truncate the file at the end of the writing.
To demonstrate how this can be done, we first perform a test case.
Create a test file, containing lots of lines:
seq 0 999999 > x
Now, lets say we want to remove all lines containing the digit 4:
grep -v 4 1<>x <x
This will open the file for reading and writing as STDOUT (1), and for reading as STDIN. The grep command will read all lines and will output only the lines not containing a 4 (option -v).
This will effectively overwrite the beginning of the original file.
You will not know how long the output is, so after the output the original contents of the file will appear:
…
999991
999992
999993
999995
999996
999997
999998
999999
537824
537825
537826
537827
537828
537829
…
You can use the Unix tool truncate to shorten your file manually afterwards. In a real scenario you will have trouble finding the right spot for this, so it makes sense to count the number of bytes written (using wc):
(Don't forget to recreate the original x for this test.)
(grep -v 4 <x | tee /dev/stderr 1<>x) |& wc -c
This will preform the step above and additionally print out the number of bytes written to the terminal, in this example case the output will be 3653658. Now use truncate:
truncate -s 3653658 x
Now you have the result you want.
If you want to do this in a script, i. e. without interaction, you can use this:
length=$((grep -v 4 <x | tee /dev/stderr 1<>x) |& wc -c)
truncate -s "$length" x
I cannot guarantee that this will work for files >2GB or >4GB on your machine; depending on your operating system (32bit?) and the versions of the installed tools you might run into largefile issues. I'd perform tests with large files first (>4GB as this is typically a limit for many things) and then cross your fingers and give it a try :)
Some caveats you have to keep in mind:
Of course, nobody is supposed to append log entries to that log file while the procedure is running.
Also, any abort during the running of the process (power failure, signal caught, etc.) will leave the file in an undefined state. But re-running the command again after such a mishap will in most cases produce the correct output; some lines might be doubled, but not more than a single line should be corrupted then.
The output must be smaller than the input, of course, otherwise the writing will overtake the reading, corrupting the whole result so that lines which should be there will be missing (or truncated at the start).
How do I quickly scrape off first few lines from a large file, without opening the whole file in main memory?
UPDATE
I do not want to pipe the starting x lines into another file and then cut the first few lines, I want to update the original file.
Not exactly vim, but to cut of the first 10 lines you could use
tail --lines=+10 somefile.txt > newfile.txt
tail -n+11 somefile.txt | vim -
To chop off the first 10* lines and open the file for edit, without creating a temporary file. Note that the file will have no name in vim when you open it this way. That's the only drawback.
* Note that although I used 11 in the command, this starts from line 11. So it will chop off the first 10 lines.
The original question was never actually answered here. I believe this is a solution:
sed -i 's/`head -n 500 foo.txt`//' foo.txt
This would eliminate the first 500 lines of a file without having to create a temporary file. (Actually, you might have to do head -n 499) I think it's actually quite useful as a one-liner for say, cleaning up log files, without just erasing the entire log.
$ seq 1 502 > foo.txt
$ sed -i 1,500d foo.txt
$ cat foo.txt
501
502
vim will always want/need to read in the whole file, so there's no way to do it using (only) vim. Darcara's suggestion looks good.
This process will always involve copying all but the first part of the file to another, so I don't see any way of doing it quickly.
Depending on what you can do with the file you may be better of using sed or awk for editing such a big file.
How about ..
split the original file into 2 parts. (p1: lines 0 - x) (p2: lines x+1 - n)
edit p1 since you want to edit the first x lines. We'll call it p1'
combine p1' and p2
In short
file -> p1 and p2
p1 -> p1'
p1' + p2 -> new_file
Commands
use split or cut
use vim or editor of your choice.
use cat to combine