Python: slicing a very large binary file

Question

Say I have a binary file of 12GB and I want to slice 8GB out of the middle of it. I know the position indices I want to cut between.

How do I do this? Obviously 12GB won't fit into memory, that's fine, but 8GB won't either... Which I thought was fine, but it appears binary doesn't seem to like it if you do it in chunks! I was appending 10MB at a time to a new binary file and there are discontinuities on the edges of each 10MB chunk in the new file.

Is there a Pythonic way of doing this easily?

Answer 1

Here's a quick example. Adapt as needed:

def copypart(src,dest,start,length,bufsize=1024*1024):
    with open(src,'rb') as f1:
        f1.seek(start)
        with open(dest,'wb') as f2:
            while length:
                chunk = min(bufsize,length)
                data = f1.read(chunk)
                f2.write(data)
                length -= chunk

if __name__ == '__main__':
    GIG = 2**30
    copypart('test.bin','test2.bin',1*GIG,8*GIG)