Awk errors when sorting large lines ( over 4000 characters)

Awk-dogg has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have a shell script that runs 26 awk statements to separate out files based upon the first record: awk '{ if($0~/^a/) print $0 }' $file > $file_a awk '{ if($0~/^b/) print $0 }' $file > $file_b awk '{ if($0~/^c/) print $0 }' $file > $file_c ..and so forth Some of these records are extermely large(>4000 characters), and the file is pipe delimited. When I run my shell script it will break on what appears to be extremely large records. awk: record 'fdss|90dd|open....' too long record number: 688 Is there any work around in awk? Can I handle this in a simpler way using Perl?

Originally posted as a Categorized Question.

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