(Part 2 - Algorithms and Techniques)

So, you already know how to load and view a 4Gb file because you’ve just finished reading Part 1 of this article series. Now you know how manage large amounts of memory, we can move on and explore a very powerful technique for actually editing a large file.

This article came about due to interest in the way my HexEdit application manages large files, but also my desire to document what I consider to be the core technology behind HexEdit. I will be describing not only the memory management techniques for loading multi-gigabyte files, but also the techniques I developed to allow extremely fast insertion and deletion from these large files.

This is a subject that tends to come up every so often in the newsgroups, so I thought I'd write an article about the techniques I've collected to enable an executable to delete itself from disk (whilst running, that is). There is very little information on the web, and what information exists is also hard to find.

There are so many large and bloated applications around today that most people just assume that this is normal and quite willingly put up with poor performance and having to buy larger harddrives.

This tutorial forms a part of a new series which will concentrate on some of the non-GUI related issues in Windows programming. The subject of this tutorial will be the CreateProcess win32 API call. The tutorial is split into several sections, each one describing a neat fact about CreateProcess which you can use to your advantage. What I will describe cannot be found in Microsoft documentation, but has been discovered by many people over the years through alot of experimentation.