Re: join

[Paul Eggert]

address@hidden writes:

> This suggests that
> the join command has a maximum number of lines it can read, is this correct?

It depends on your machine and OS.  For example, if you have many
lines with the same key 'join' has to keep them all in memory, and if
they don't fit in memory it will fail.  It has to count the lines,
too, and the counter is of limited size.

> From my test, it turns out to be somewhere around 6600 lines after which
> the program terminates.

Most likely the problem is somewhere else, then.  On 32-bit machines
the limit is around 4 billion bytes' worth of lines (or less if your
computer has less memory).

I'd guess your input files were not sorted.