Question

I am working on a Perl script to read CSV file and do some calculations. CSV file has only two columns, something like below.

One Two 1.00 44.000 3.00 55.000 

Now this CSV file is very big ,can be from 10 MB to 2GB.

Currently I am taking CSV file of size 700 MB. I tried to open this file in notepad, excel but it looks like no software is going to open it.

I want to read may be last 1000 lines from CSV file and see the values. How can I do that? I cannot open file in notepad or any other program.

If I write a Perl script then I need to process complete file to go to end of file and then read last 1000 lines.

Is there any better way to that? I am new to Perl and any suggestions will be appreciated.

I have searched net and there are some scripts available like File::Tail but I don’t know they will work on windows ?

Answer 1

In *nix, you can use the tail command.

tail -1000 yourfile | perl ... 

That will write only the last 1000 lines to the perl program.

On Windows, there are gnuwin32 and unxutils packages both have tail utility.