note
rowdog
<p> Not that this seems to help you very much but [man://sort] was my first instinct too. My rather dated Debian Squeeze box is an AMD 3800+ (64 bit dual core) with 2 gigs RAM and one 5 year old IDE drive can almost do it.</p>
<c>$ perl 860849.pl
Took 131.000000 seconds for 10000000 items (0.00001 per second)
</c>
<p>
I think I could reach that 108 by putting the sorted file on a separate spindle with a thinner filesystem layer (e.g. no ext3 and LVM2).
</p>
<p>
I'm really pointing this out because it's quite attainable with a reasonably recent hard drive. Maybe even just SATA/PATA would do the trick. SSD surely would.
</p>
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860849