Sorting Large File (Code/Performance)

[John Machin]

On Jan 25, 8:26 am, Ira.Ko... at gmail.com wrote:

> I need to isolate all lines that start with two characters (zz to be
> particular)

What does "isolate" mean to you? What does this have to do with
sorting?  What do you actually want to do with (a) the lines starting
with "zz" (b) the other lines? What percentage of the lines start with
"zz"?

When looking at the GnuWin32 collection:
(a) "Unicode" is not relevant to your sort problem.
(b) grab yourself a wc and a grep while you're there -- they will help
with "how many lines" and "what percentage of lines" questions.