But by the time you actually get count, isn't the line already read in memory. So if the line is 7 gigabytes, it'll probably crash the system. 7stud -- wrote: > Tristin Davis wrote: >> I'm trying to emulate the new feature in 1.9 that allows you to specify >> the maximum length of a line read in Ruby 1.8.6. Can anyone help? > > max = 3 > count = 0 > > IO.foreach('data.txt') do |line| > if count == max > break > else > count += 1 > end > > puts line > end -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.