At 11/29/2000 06:29, you wrote:

Dear Jacob,

begin readln(asc_file,buffer); inc(cell_count); strPcopy(file_array,buffer);

This just doesn't make any sense, you probably left out parts from the source you sent to the list. For instance, you are not writing to any file, only to the standard output. You should specify the task in a little bit more detail. If I got it right, your input file contains the actual filenames (or some portions of those). The simplest way to spread them into various files would be to read a line from the input file, decode the filename to be written to, open it (with rewrite the first time, with append later on), write into it whatever you want, then close it again.

Whether this would be fast enough, depends on the size of the input file, the number of possible output files and the distribution of the lines in the input file. If there are only a few AAA, AAB and similar items, you might leave all output files open and close all of them only at the end.

If you want to have a general solution that is best suited to all kinds of input, you should first ask the operating system how many files you can open at a time, and keep track of the usage of all these files. When you run out of this pool of files while reading the input, you can close the file you used least recently and open the new file instead. Whenever you write into a file from the pool, you have to note this usage. This involves quite a lot of additional work, so it only pays off if you need a general solution that is to be used frequently.

Regards,

   Gabor DEAK JAHN

------------------------------------------------------------------- Gabor DEAK JAHN -- Budapest, Hungary.
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