From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me
X-Spam-Level: 
X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FREEMAIL_FROM
	autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4
X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit
X-Google-Thread: 103376,14bff0642983a2a5
X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public
X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-07-29 18:53:20 PST
Path: 
 archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!headwall.stanford.edu!newshub.sdsu.edu!elnk-nf2-pas!newsfeed.earthlink.net!newsfeed.news2me.com!cyclone1.gnilink.net!spamkiller2.gnilink.net!nwrdny03.gnilink.net.POSTED!53ab2750!not-for-mail
From: Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US;
 rv:1.5b) Gecko/20030723 Thunderbird/0.1
X-Accept-Language: en-us, en
MIME-Version: 1.0
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: sorting large numbers of large records
References: <bg5rol$rnp$1@grapevine.wam.umd.edu>
 <yecispkluok.fsf@king.cts.com>
In-Reply-To: <yecispkluok.fsf@king.cts.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Message-ID: <jyFVa.715$7h6.251@nwrdny03.gnilink.net>
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 01:53:19 GMT
NNTP-Posting-Host: 162.83.157.195
X-Complaints-To: abuse@verizon.net
X-Trace: nwrdny03.gnilink.net 1059529999 162.83.157.195 (Tue,
 29 Jul 2003 21:53:19 EDT)
NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 21:53:19 EDT
Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:40979
Date: 2003-07-30T01:53:19+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

Keith Thompson wrote:
 > If you're using GNU sort, the length of each line can be unlimited;

So there :-)

> Finally, I'm not sure what GNU sort (or any other Unix-like sort) does
> with input too big to fit into memory;

As far as I know, UNIX sort has always been able to sort arbitrarily large
files by doing what I suggested in an earlier message - sort pieces of the
original into temporary files, then merge them together.