Process very large (>20GB) text file line by line

Question

I have a number of very large text files which I need to process, the largest being about 60GB.

Each line has 54 characters in seven fields and I want to remove the

Answer 1

Since you only mention saving space as a benefit, is there some reason you can't just store the files gzipped? That should save 70% and up on this data. Or consider getting NTFS to compress the files if random access is still important. You'll get much more dramatic savings on I/O time after either of those.

More importantly, where is your data that you're getting only 3.4GB/hr? That's down around USBv1 speeds.