Bill's solution is no less "computationally complex" than any of the correct
solutions, which all involved reading the file, and skipping the first 300 lines. The
original poster didn't say he wanted to feed the result to STDIN of another process, but
rather:
Grant Kelly wrote:
I have a text file, it's about 2.3 GB. I need to delete the first 300
lines, and I don't want to have to load the entire thing into an
editor.
Given this information, the proposed solutions where all reasonable. Once we
had more information, more elegant solutions where available.
True, but I was making an assumption on program operation based on
previous comments in this thread: mainly that the resultant file was to
be fed into a database with no mention of file reuse.
"Computational Complexity" has little to do with what the command line "looks
like", but rather what goes on inside the program.
We obviously have enough information to fully describe Grant's problem
now, so from here on we're just arguing on the semantics of the solution
based on a description of the problem from yesterday. Please note that
I'm not in disagreement on any front... but...
First off, I'm familiar with the definition of computational complexity.
If we assume a complete solution to Grant's problem (file is read, 300
lines removed, fed into database), and that there is a _similar_ _cost_
for each proposed solution, then reading and writing the file twice will
cost more than the same operations once. Right? I agree that previous
solutions can be modified to perform similarly to Bill's suggested
solution, but, as they stand, they will have a greater time complexity.
- Sebastian
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