I posted a question re: the temporary file created by vi. We have users who vi large files, and we had a problem with the large temporary files being created. I wanted to know why the 'view' command also created this file, and was there a way to stop it. I have summarised some of the replies in case they benefit others, but I have not followed up all of the suggestions, as I may take the easier(!) option of re-educating the users. Thanks to all for these responses: no, you can't stop vi using a temporary file - David Evans , Kevin Sheehan view is not truly r-only, you can W! to save changes, so you need a temp file -David Evans vi and view are the same, both use a temp file - David Thorburn-Gundlach , Brad Young point .exrc to a non-writable directory - David Harte (didn't work!) use vim (http://www.vim.org/) - Troy Wollenslegel , Frank Cusack use sed or GNU's nvi (ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu.) - Rich Kulawiec , Brian Sherwood use less (http://smc.vnet.net/solaris_2.5.html) - Gene Rackow , Eugene Kramer , Brad Young , Peter Polasek , Michael Hill use split to break the file up into smaller files - Mark Hargrave