Hello Monks!
I have a very large file, size ~5 TB, that has 95 columns (tab-separated). I need to load this on a DB, so, in order to find out the column specifications I should use, I need to know what type of data each column has. What I do so far is to cut each column and then make its contents unique 
 
cut -f1 my_big_file > column1 
sort -u column1 > column1.uniq

[download]

and then study each of them. But I was wondering, since the cut is been taking like 2 days now and still not done, can you suggest a faster way perhaps? Maybe with a hash? But, will a hash be able to handle such a large file?
Thank you!

In reply to Possible faster way to do this? by Anonymous Monk

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