iterating over lines in a file

[Grant Edwards]

On Fri, 21 Jul 2000 15:42:17 -0700, Daley, Mark W <mark.w.daley at intel.com> wrote:

>Isn't the argument for readlines() a memory size, as in 512 bytes?  If so,
>it is possible to have 3509 lines that are <= 512 bytes.

Last time I counted, a newline took up one byte in a file for
Unix/MacOS and two bytes for MS-DOS/Windows. Therefore, the
upper bound is 512 for number of lines in a 512 byte file.

There may be some degenerate way to put more that 512 lines in
a 512 byte file under one the eight gazillion file formats
supported by VMS, but off the top of my head, I don't think so.

NB: it looked like to me that the size in question was the sum
of the lengths of all of the lines read, and not the number of
lines read.

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