in reply to How to work on a large Data file line by line

You can open the file without having all (however many) GB's read into memory. Opening the file just gives you access to it; what you do from that point is up to you. You can read in a file line by line this way: 
open FOO, "<my_hug_file.dat";
while (<FOO>) { # reads one line of the file into $_
   # do something
}
close FOO;

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Re^2: How to work on a large Data file line by line
by tubaandy (Deacon) on Jul 08, 2008 at 16:03 UTC
    I agree with AM, I've found that opening up and reading the file line by line (and operating on a line, then reading in the next line) works well in this case. However, this typically is only useful if all the data you are working with is in that line. If the data is spread across more lines, that's still not as big of a problem. However, I'd go with MidLifeXis' suggestion below if you need to act on the whole file at once. FWIW.

    tubaandy
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