I'd just use a decent shell scripting language (like zsh) in conjunction with a unix tool like awk. But the gnuplot option sounds ideal. Bill William G. Scott Professor Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and The Center for the Molecular Biology of RNA 228 Sinsheimer Laboratories University of California at Santa Cruz Santa Cruz, California 95064 USA On Sep 12, 2012, at 7:32 AM, Jacob Keller <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > Dear List, > > since this probably comes up a lot in manipulation of pdb/reflection files and so on, I was curious what people thought would be the best language for the following: I have some huge (100s MB) tables of tab-delimited data on which I would like to do some math (averaging, sigmas, simple arithmetic, etc) as well as some sorting and rejecting. It can be done in Excel, but this is exceedingly slow even in 64-bit, so I am looking to do it through some scripting. Just as an example, a "sort" which takes >10 min in Excel takes ~10 sec max with the unix command sort (seems crazy, no?). Any suggestions? > > Thanks, and sorry for being off-topic, > > Jacob > > -- > ******************************************* > Jacob Pearson Keller > Northwestern University > Medical Scientist Training Program > email: [log in to unmask] > *******************************************