It is a big file which is going to take some time to read.  How long 
probably depends as much on your disks as on R.  On my system:

 > system.time( y <- scan(file = "/tmp/dat.txt", what = integer(0)) )
Read 1200000000 items
    user  system elapsed
197.085  15.164 216.149

This is with a test file containing only the value 0: try that first.  
Try a faster disk (local, not NFS, for example).

Hope this helps a little.

Allan.


On 20/08/09 08:30, Mohamed Lajnef wrote:
> Dear Jim & Michael
>
> the file contains 1000 lines and 1.200.000 columns, txt format and  i 
> wish to read all the file with R if  possible, or  read a few columns?
>
> I tried without success to turn bigmemory and colbycol packages, also 
> scan and readLines  function but  It takes a long time without anything.
>
> I have windows X64 bits 8 Go
>
> In advance thanks
> ML
>
>
>
>
> jim holtman a écrit :
>> A little more detail would be appropriate.  How large is "large"?
>> What is the format of the file?  What do you wnat to do with the data?
>>  Do you have to have it all in memory at once?  Does it exist in a
>> data base already?  What type of system are you running on?  How much
>> memory do you have?  ............
>>
>> On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 4:51 AM, Mohamed 
>> Lajnef<Mohamed.lajnef@inserm.fr> wrote:
>>> Dear R-Users,
>>>
>>> I am looking for packages that could read large files in R?
>>> any suggestions are welcome.
>>> Regards,
>>> ML
>>>
>>> ______________________________________________
>>> R-help@r-project.org mailing list
>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>>> PLEASE do read the posting guide 
>>> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help@r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide 
> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]


