Is there a utility to search for a value in a sorted file using binary
search. The file was sorted using the 'sort' command.
[/snip]
Is there any reason why you want to use a binary search, except for speed?
Well, linear search on a 60GB file is likely to be many orders of
magnitude slower than binary search.
Unless the lines are fixed-length, after each chop, the search program
will have to find the start-of-line character.
This is likely to negate any advantage gained from binary searches.
Just a little bit. Finding the start-of-line is easy and quite fast
since it is an in-memory operation. The speed in such operations is
usually limited by disk-I/Os
I'd sugest just sticking to grep. You can use the '-l' (ell) option -
this will exit when the first matching line is found, (but not display
it).
I ended up writing my own binary search utility. We are discussing if it
should be made a part of gnu.coreutils.
Sorav
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