On Jan 24, 4:26 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > 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. >
Since the OP has stated that they are running Windows XP, and more than one poster has suggested installing more RAM in the box, I thought people should know that WinXP has certain limitations on the amount of memory that may be used: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778.aspx Firstly, the maximum amount of physical memory that may be installed is 4GB. Secondly, with the "4 gigabyte tuning" and "IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE" patches, the maximum amount of virtual memory (phyical memory + swapfile size) that may be assigned to user processes is 2GB. Hence, even if you made a 100GB swap file with 4GB RAM installed, by default only a maximum of 2GB would ever be assigned to a user- process. With the two flags enabled, the maximum becomes 3GB. If the OP finds performance to be limited and thinks more RAM would help trying a later version of Windows would be a start, but better would be to try Linux or Mac OSX out. Cheers, Asim > Cheers, > > Ira -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
