]> On Sun, 9 Nov 2003, Michael Hoisie wrote: > I have a file which is approximately 278,440 lines of text (more > specifically, it is the result of doing 'ls -lAR /') -l lists the file size in *bytes*, not lines. Use 'wc -l longfile.dat' to determine the number of lines. If each line is ~10.6 bytes long (including the EOLN) then a 278,000 byte file will be about 26,000 lines long. The -A means "almost all" (everything except . and ..), and the R means recursive (list subdirectories as well). > > I was trying to write this relatively simple program to analyze it but > it seems that End_of_file was thrown very early. > > To test, it, I made a simple function: > > let rec count_lines file n = > try let str = input_line file in > count_lines file (n + 1) > with End_of_file -> Printf.printf "The file is %d\n lines long" n This function isn't tail recursive- the function's call to itself is within a try/with block, which breaks the tail recursion. That isn't the problem you're hitting, but you're not far from hitting it. I generally hit it about 30,000 functions deep or so. Try the following instead: let rec count_lines file n = let line, eof = try (input_line file), false with End_of_file -> "", true in if not eof then begin (* do something with line here *) count_lines file (n + 1) end else n let file = open_in "longfile.dat" in Printf.printf "The file is %d lines long.\n" (count_lines file 0) Note that the tail recursion is now outside of the try/with block, and this function will work with any length file. Brian ------------------- To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/ Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners