Well, there's always that middle ground between C and perl - XS modules. Cut probably still beats it, but Text::CSV_XS appears to be faster than split for files of that size. And has the added advantage of supporting embedded newlines and embedded delimiters.

For a 1 million row table of 100 columns, sum the second column: 

             s/iter        Split Text::CSV_XS
Split          49.8           --          -8%
Text::CSV_XS   45.9           8%           --

In reply to Re: cut vs split (suggestions) by jZed
in thread cut vs split (suggestions) by sk

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