I wrote a quick program to sort a log file, at the time it worked great, but now the log files are getting to be 80 - 100 MB before the sort is run. When I run my program I'm starting to get out of memory errors. At the rate we are growing the log files will grow by ~50 MB a month, and I can't split the log files to anything smaller. I know I could write a buble sort and keep the contents on the disk, but I don't want to thrash the disk that much. Does anyone know of a good way to sort large files?

Here is an example of the log file format:

[05:24:50.7] : Start     963365840704     0     Fri Feb 16, 2001 17:24
+:50.704 CST    select FOO from BAR where foo_bar = 578525 order by FO
+O
[05:24:50.7] : End     963365840704     15
[05:24:50.7] : Start     982365890719     1     Fri Feb 16, 2001 17:24
+:50.719 CST    select BAR from FOO where var_foo = 578525 order by BA
+R
[05:24:50.7] : End     982365890719     0

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I just need the sql statements, but they need to be sorted. Below is the code I wrote: 
print sort {$a cmp $b} map {(split /\t/,$_)[4]} grep {(substr ($_,15,5
+) eq "Start")?1:0}<>;

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In reply to Sorting a large file by c-era

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