As salva just said, I'd be tempted to change the way you access the data. Naively (because this is not my bread and butter), I'd either create an index file of field -> file+line number and sort on that or pre-sort them into similar files so that there's less work to do.

Not that these are particularly brilliant ideas, but I'm just trying to illustrate the point that there's more than one way to crack this nut and to look in different directions.

best of luck,

perl -e 'print qq(Just another Perl Hacker\n)' # where's the irony switch?

In reply to Re: sorting very large text files by Ea
in thread sorting very large text files by rnaeye

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