I'm not sure you really need to know an exact line count to do this... Just put the first 1024 lines into the first file, the next 1024 into the second file, etc. and end up with as many files as you end up with, using the disks round-robin to distribute them as evenly as possible. (The number of lines per file is arbitrary, of course, but I'm guessing 1024 would provide a manageable number of files and powers of 2 have the nice property of allowing you to just do $line_number >> 10 to determine the file to use instead of requiring the CPU to do actual division.)

In reply to Re^3: Help performing "random" access on very very large file by dsheroh
in thread Help performing "random" access on very very large file by downer

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