Hi,
 
I am looking for an efficient way of skipping big chunks of lines on a
connection (not necessarily at the beginning of the file). One way is to
use read lines, e.g. readLines(1e6), but a) this incurs the overhead of
construction of the return char vector and b) has a (fairly remote)
potential to blow up the memory.
 
Another way would be to use scan(), e.g. 
 
scan(con, skip=1e6, nmax=0)
 
but somehow this doesn't work:
 
> scan(con, skip=10, nmax=0)
Error in scan(con, skip = 10, nmax = 0) : 
 "scan" expected a real, got "A;12;0;"

 
I can stick to readLines, but am curious if there is a better way.
 
 
I use R-1.8.1 on RH-7.3.
 
 
Thanks,
Vadim

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