For sorting more data than you have room for I recommend tieing a hash through DB_File to a BTree. That allows you to just put items into the hash and then pull them out in sorted order.

There is some overhead to the structure, so without large file support this will usually only suffice for a little over a GB of data. With large file support and sufficient disk, you can handle many terabytes efficiently.

In reply to Re (tilly) 1: Sorting data that don't fit in memory by tilly
in thread Sorting data that don't fit in memory by jeroenes

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