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Or rather, compared to a server log file that hasn't been properly rotated. I wrote a program a while back to incrementally parse a daily log file which was never rotated. It got say that it would take twenty minutes for for the program to just skip the lines that had been parsed previously. When those who had the power to do so started rotating the file, things speed up tremendously.

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Why didn't you split it?

Sparing that, why not use fseek() and do a binary search to get to where you wanted to go? Even better, save the prior offset somewhere and jump there immediately on T+1?

I used this trick the other day -- compute byte range partitions on a large file and use fseek when processing each. Is there a standard unix program that can output an arbitrary byte range from a seekable input? At first blush dd(1) looked like the ticket, but block-oriented operation means extra invocations to deal with a byte range that's not necessarily block-aligned.

tail -c offset [input] | head -c length

will do the job.

You can set dd's "bs" parameter to 1, then seek, skip & count are all in terms of bytes.

That, I should have done. I thought to save the number of lines previously read so that I could skip them; I don't know why it didn't occur to me to just save the whole damn offset.

I couldn't, I didn't have control over the file.

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