Using a hash as mentioned earlier is probably easiest though it can get slow on huge numbers of elements -- even if you have to resort to tieing a hash to a file. One low tech way, if you are using some unix variant and have extra disk, may be to use the unix sort utility before you pass through the file with perl. Then all of your entries should appear in order or at least close together (though you may have to play some games with sort's options to get the exact order you want).

I've used sort on files in the GB range with millions of lines of text. Note: one good sanity check, in addition to checking for errors from sort, is to make sure the sorted file is the same size as the input file. Update: Took out references to "GNU" since I'm not sure I've specifically used it on files that large (though it might work fine).

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