[GRASS-user] How to grep basic statistics from a vector ascii (x, y, z) file and export in a new ascii?

[David Finlayson]

Your task sounds like it would be best done by a small script or C
program. Just read the data in a line-at-a-time and check if the
current line is larger than the previously stored line. At the end of
the file, print out the largest line (to a file if you have multiple
results to store). Probably 5 or 6 lines of Perl/Python at most and
you would be able to read arbitrarily huge files (millions of rows).
Most other solutions would introduce complexity or unnecessary
overhead. For lidar data, you may not have enough RAM to hold the
whole file in memory and the last thing you want to do is attach
topology to each point before you manipulate it.