Thanks to all the suggestions. To the first individual that replied, I can't do any stuff with unix or perl. All I know is R.
@KEN: I'm using Windows 7, 64 bit. @Steve: Here's the readLines output.. As we can see, lines 1-3 are empty and line 5 is empty, and there's also empty elements after line 5!. [1] " " [2] " " [3] " " [4] " PERMNO DATE TICKER PERMCO PRC VOL NUMTRD vwretd ewretd" [5] "" [6] " 10000 06/01/1986 7952 . . . -0.000138 0.001926" [7] " 10000 07/01/1986 OMFGA 7952 -2.56250 1000 . 0.013809 0.011061" [8] " 10000 08/01/1986 OMFGA 7952 -2.50000 12800 . -0.020744 -0.005117" [9] " 10000 09/01/1986 OMFGA 7952 -2.50000 1400 . -0.011219 -0.011588" [10] " 10000 10/01/1986 OMFGA 7952 -2.50000 8500 . 0.000083 0.003651" [11] " 10000 13/01/1986 OMFGA 7952 -2.62500 5450 . 0.002749 0.002433" ----- ---- Isaac Research Assistant Quantitative Finance Faculty, UTS -- View this message in context: http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/Handling-8GB-txt-file-in-R-tp4500971p4502706.html Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.