Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello,

Is it possible in awk to release storage that has been allocated?

I am reading two large similar text files and comparing them to create a delta. Each time I read a line from a file I store it in an array - one for each file. It is impossible to know in advance how far it may be necessary to backtrack up each file/array to re-establish correspondence, but once a new correspondence has been established all the old array elements are no longer needed. Can they be returned to the system to reallocate?

I am using gawk 3.1.5 from cygwin and running under Windows XP. (Please don't scream - I wish it was Unix, too!)

look into awk's "delete"

Thank you.