Super hacky python script I used to turn the text files into a sqlite database:

https://pastebin.com/gBWhCVGz

Thanks, this worked for me! Here's my contribution; I tweaked your script a little for memory usage. https://pastebin.com/4hA8VACe

Thanks. I tweaked the script to include an incremental printout across files and also creating an index on phone num to easily search.

https://pastebin.com/AxY5PeDQ

I suggest using a shell program like grep (or even the search feature of less), as shell programs are notoriously good at lazily seeking through files to keep memory use low.

Firstly don’t do something like open it in notepad. 1GB text files are not exactly difficult to work with once you use a proper text editor or parsing tools.

Does it open with Geany?

https://www.geany.org/

It's FLOSS. Available on Windows, Mac and Linux.

I used to use Borland's Brief to edit large files. But it is commercial. There is a free version in beta here https://sourceforge.net/projects/grief/ Grief. It pages the file in and out of memory to save space.

Try Ultra Edit, free trial. It can read and search massive text files without crashing. Quite responsive.on 10GB files.

You can use `awk` for any sql like operations on file.

sqlight can ".read" a number of formats. It's one of the more convenient ways to do joins on ugly tables.