Reading files into memory

[thathoo]

Hi
I want to be able to load files into memory and then carry out my computation. Here is the thing, I have over 10000 files with average 50KB data. I need to store all of them in my RAM. Assuming I have the necessary RAM, how do i do this. I need to be able to go to each line of each file later on, which is to say I need easy access to data inside these files. I wrote this but this does not work:

my %table1=();
for($var=1;$var<2; $var++)
{
....
.......
.........
open A, $mov_i || die "Shit there is some prob here $!";
$table1{$var} = <A>;
close A;
}

foreach $row ($table1{1})
{
print "$row\n";
}

This just prints the first row of the file. But if i replce $table1{$var} with @table1 then I can get the contents of that file, but the problem is that I need to store all the files in a table for easy access to their data.

Rahul

[miller]

open A, $mov_i || die "Shit there is some prob here $!";
$table1{$var} = <A>;
close A;

The above code will not work as you expect. I think you need to read up more on file operations in perl. As a quick fix though, you can add the following line to your code.

{
    local $/;
    $table1{$var} = <A>;
}
 

This will cause the entire file to be slurped into your data structure as wanted. If you're plannong on doing operatiosn on the individual lines of your file though, it would make more sense to save the file in an array data structure. Nevertheless, the above code will solve your initial problem. You can hopefully take it from here.