Thanks to all who replied. It's very appreciated. Yes, I had to doublecheck line counts and the number of lines is ~16 million (insetead of stated 1.6B).
Also: >What is a "Unicode text file"? How is it encoded: utf8, utf16, utf16le, >utf16be, ??? If you don't know, do this: The file is UTF-8 > Do the first two characters always belong to the ASCII subset? Yes, first two always belong to ASCII subset > What are you going to do with it after it's sorted? I need to isolate all lines that start with two characters (zz to be particular) > Here's a start: http://docs.python.org/lib/typesseq-mutable.html > Google "GnuWin32" and see if their sort does what you want. Will do, thanks for the tip. > If you really have a 2GB file and only 2GB of RAM, I suggest that you don't > hold your breath. I am limited with resources. Unfortunately. Cheers, Ira -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
