I agree that native unix sort is probably the best idea. You can install modules see A Guide To Installing Modules for details on how to install locally for yourself. If you have memory to burn you could just slurp the file into an array and sort it using perl's sort: 

#!/usr/bin/perl
open F, $ARGV[0] or die "Usage $0 infile > outfile\n";
@ary = <F>;
close F;
print for sort @ary;

[download]

This code will almost certainly be significantly slower and use a lot more memory than native unix sort. Because we output the sorted results immediately we only have one array in memory.....

cheers

tachyon

In reply to Re: How to sort a large flat file 90mb with PERL-- various ways/tradeoffs/watchouts by tachyon
in thread How to sort a large flat file 90mb with PERL-- various ways/tradeoffs/watchouts by maxon11

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.