Jim Meyering <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Leo Butler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> < Paul Eggert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> < ... >> < > Hmm, it sounds like your input data has some very long lines, then. >> < > That would explain at least part of your problem, then. 'sort' needs >> < > to keep at least two lines in main memory to compare them: if single >> < > input lines are many gigabytes long, then 'sort' must consume many >> < > gigabytes of memory, regardless of what parameter you specify with '-S'. >> < >> < You can run this to find the maximum line length: >> < >> < wc --max-line-length your-data > ... >> $ /usr/bin/wc -L /data/espace/k_400_a.out >> 107 > > That would have worked if your data really did have > the form you originally described. > > With binary data, you have be careful. > E.g., translate all non-printable/space bytes to "." > before using wc -L: > > tr -c '[:print:][:space:]' '[.*]' < your-data | wc -L
Or, you could simply translate all non-newline bytes to e.g., ".": tr -c '\n' '[.*]' < your-data | wc -L _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils