comment on

As salva just said, I'd be tempted to change the way you access the data. Naively (because this is not my bread and butter), I'd either create an index file of field -> file+line number and sort on that or pre-sort them into similar files so that there's less work to do.

Not that these are particularly brilliant ideas, but I'm just trying to illustrate the point that there's more than one way to crack this nut and to look in different directions.

best of luck,

perl -e 'print qq(Just another Perl Hacker\n)' # where's the irony switch?

In reply to Re: sorting very large text files by Ea
in thread sorting very large text files by rnaeye

Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>
Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.


We don't bite newbies here... much
	PerlMonks