> I have a file that is 3,480,231kB of unsorted ASCII values, and I need it
> sorted... and, yes, I do have some idea of the time that this will take.

Unix sort apparently claims to be "large file aware", which means that
it can operate on and generate files larger than 2G (this might be a
solaris-specific issue.)  "sort" is certainly capable of sorting files
larger than memory, so it's certainly worth a try.  3G of data isn't
"large" compared to filesystems these days - that's when you'd start to
run into real computer science: "how do I sort 3G of data with 256K of
memory and 4G of disk total" :-)

unix "sort" is part of the cygwin environment, and it seems to have sorted
by 145MB 2001 mail file in less than 5 minutes on a rather old (400MHz?)
computer.  Your file is "only" 30 times bigger...

BillW

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