>> [...] > Why not stat the input file and decide to use in memory iff the file > is small enough? This way sort will handle large sorts on small > memory machines automatically.
Well, I'm not the one (putatively) doing the work. But my answers to that are: (1) Small sorts are not the issue, IMO. Even a speedup as great as halving the time taken is not enough to worry about when it's on a par with the cost of starting sort(1) at all. (2) Using mmap versus read provides minimal speedup in this sort of case: a small file which is being read sequentially. (3) Code complexity: two paths means twice the testing, twice the opportunities for bugs, (slightly more than) twice the maintenance, etc. (4) Are there still incoherencies between mmap and read/write access? At one time there were, and I never got a good handle on what needed to be done to avoid them. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
