hm... lemme try to describe it a bit better. I have a series of files, some of them up to 800 megs (and actually i think larger... yep, 1.6 gigs... damn...) and they are all organized in such a way that there is a record every new line. Instead of: read line, process line, write out line, repeat... which is slow (and hard on the IO subsystem) I would like to: read 10000 lines, process 10000 lines, write them out, repeat. my theory being that this would be more efficient IO wise... make better sense?