David,

Using the ?count.fields revealed that I only have 2410 columns. That fixed
the problem I had. I used, data_tmp[,842:2410] and that gave me the solution
I was looking for. This, ironically, also solved the other problem I had.

As for:


>
> You also say file.remove( fileout) , then you try to append to fileout.
> Does that make sense?
>
>
I am dealing with a file that is about 4GB in size. It has over 500,000
lines. As I process it, I am grabbing a chunk of lines, filtering the
unwanted columns, and writing that chunk to the file. I suppose I should
have two write functions, one that does not append (the first write), and
the rest that append.


Thank you very much, to all of you who helped. I can write good C code, but
the 'R' is all new to me :)

-- 
Jason Thibodeau

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