... isn't writing chunks then concatenating them simply going to defer the memory consumption problem to the program doing the concatenation?

Nope. Concatenating files takes very little application memory unless you're trying to optimize disk head movement. Even then, the OS generally does a better job. Think 

  while ( <IN> ) {
    print OUT $_;
  }

[download]
but in slighly larger chunks.

In reply to Re^3: Managing System Memory Resources by dws
in thread Managing System Memory Resources by Sandy

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