Thinking about it, you would need a 64-bit value to point to the offset because of the size of the file. But an index file of 64-bit offsets could easily be se

Thinking about it, you would need a 64-bit value to point to the offset because of the size of the file. But an index file of 64-bit offsets could easily be seeked to read the value of the offset based upon the first 2 or even 4 byte offset. Though with 4 bytes, that becomes a 4 gigabyte index file! But that would probably be much faster as you only do one seek in one file, then another seek to the main file, then search a much shorter distance to the result! If the system has enough ram, the operating system will cache the files anyway and will be pretty fast i think. (can you tell my first job involved writing ad-hoc database systems?)