xml - xmlstarlet sel on large file

Question

The command

$ xmlstarlet sel -t -c "/collection/record" file.xml

seems to load the whole file into memory, before applying the given Xpath expression. This is not usable for large XML files.

Does xmlstarlet provide a streaming mode to extract subelements from a large (100G+) XML file?

Answer 1

Since I only needed a tiny subset of XPath for large XML files, I actually implemented a little tool myself: xmlcutty.

The example from my question could be written like this:

$ xmlcutty -path /collection/record file.xml