thank you very much! this sounds exactly like what i'm looking for.
on a second thought, maybe i do not HAVE to push everything inside a single file, but just keeping a few files. i need to think about this point, because i'll need to do pairwise comparison after constructing these hash tables (table against table) by looking for common keys. originally i thought that by having all keys sorted in a single file, it's really easy for me to make such comparisons. but maybe having several files can save a lot more cost at the table construction stage.