oiskuu. Thanks for pursuing this and posting your findings. Unfortunately, I do not understand what I am reading?

1. You read 200 million 36 byte records from /dev/urandom;

   Then you unpack them as: a)a 64-bit uint; and b) the rest as a string, from which you remove any non alpha characters (with redo if nothing is left);

   And print the string and int to stdout;

   Which you pipe through: sort & perl & sort & perl & sort & perl to ???

2. You then count the lengths of the first fields from a file called data?
3. You then run an executable call a.out supplying a number and the data file?

   Which produces some output?