reading ascii matrix

[Ben Bauer]

Info:
Octave, version 2.1.9 (i686-pc-linux-gnu). 
(PIII 550 with 256M ram)
Linux  2.2.16
egcs-2.91.66 19990314/Linux (egcs-1.1.2 release)  



I have a plain ascii file of 2 columns and
approx 2.8 million rows that I need to do some
statistics on. In my octave script I have 
  
 for i=1:p
  [a(i),b(i)]=fscanf(myfile,"%f %f","C"); 
  ...

where p is the number of records in the file.


This program has been reading in the data for
2 days now.  Currently just less than half the
data are read in according to a print command I
have in the loop.  There must be a better way!
The the entire script runs in about 1.5 minutes
for a shorter file of 20000 data pairs, with the
majority of the time taken in reading the data.



Any useful suggestions would be appreciated.  Thanks.



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