I need to do some 'search & replace' over some plain text files. Some of the files are 1Gb+ so my usual editor (Textpad) gives up and crashes after 250k rows or so.

Is there a simple vbs or dos command I can run over a file(s), without the need to open it/them? Or perhaps some free dedicated software to do the job?

 

You could try Notepad++. That should be able to handle it.

Failing that, use cygwin and grep/sed etc

 

Cheers Iain. I managed to do it in the end . . . a couple of ways. One was to increase my virtual memory maximum size to 9999Mb so that Textpad didn't crap-out; the other was a command line utility called FART (Find And Replace Text)

FART worked superbly; bashed though the 1Gb text file in seconds, even though it was making millions of replacements Think I'll keep that one for future use