What do you want to do with it once you have read it in? There is no point in reading in a matrix that is likely to take up all of the available memory (160Mb if numeric) ....
Possible suggestions are to load it into a database and access in blocks of rows or columns, or spend a small amount of money on another 1Gb of memory and write C code in a package to read the file. On Sat, 1 Feb 2003 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I am looking for suggestions to read a large fixed-column format file and > create a data-frame with about 50,000 observations and 400 variables, each > variable in 2--5 colums. This is on a machine with 128 Mb of RAM with R on > Linux or MS-win. I will also be thankful for any other suggestions about > working with data of this size. -- Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595 ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
