Absolutely right. Doing this in Perl would be a waste of time if this is a one-off, and if there is no prior or subsequent processing. The only value is in implementing a merge sort, which is good practise I suppose.

For Perl to sort, it first must slurp. The question of whether the input is already sorted therefore matters greatly.

But our OP is absent, and hasn't responded to any questions. So given our lack of information, I agree with dba.

In reply to Re^2: join on 6 huge files by pbeckingham
in thread join on 6 huge files by dwhite20899

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