The standard unix sort command automatically writes temp files when its memory usage increases too much, maybe that works for you.

You could also take a look at Sort::External. From its documentation:

Problem: You have a list which is too big to sort in-memory.

Solution: "feed, finish, and fetch" with Sort::External, the closest thing to a drop-in replacement for Perl's sort() function when dealing with unmanageably large lists.

In reply to Re: Sorting Gigabytes of Strings Without Storing Them by moritz
in thread Sorting Gigabytes of Strings Without Storing Them by neversaint

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