As one man was quoted "640K of memory should be enough for anybody" no one will need to access more than 2 GB data. What happens if you - just for scientific reasons of course - try to access larger files using your 32bit hardware and your favorite programming language PHP?

They give the example of opening a large 2 gig file with PHP and the resulting error that would pop up. They try a few differnt ways before getting down to more of a non-PHP PHP solution (yes, you read that right). They decided, instead, to create a script to work with the file chunked, using an exec() call to the unix split command to break it up.