I need to read a large file, line by line. Lets say that file has more than 5GB and I need to read each line, but obviously I do not want to use readlines() because it will create a very large list in the memory.
How will the code below work for this case? Is xreadlines itself reading one by one into memory? Is the generator expression needed?
f = (line for line in open("log.txt").xreadlines()) # how much is loaded in memory?
f.next()
Plus, what can I do to read this in reverse order, just as the Linux tail command?
I found:
http://code.google.com/p/pytailer/
and
“python head, tail and backward read by lines of a text file”
Both worked very well!
