Dividing a file into chunks along line endings in Erlang

I’ve been dabbling in Erlang recently. I’ve wanted to learn a functional programming language for a while now and Erlang’s concurrency make it rather attractive.

For my “hello world” app, I decided to write a simple log parser which processes chunks of a file in parallel. Here is a part of that app which produces a list of tuples which describes the chunks adjusted to the nearest newline (Unix newlines, \n, in this case).

getChunkDivisions(File, 0, Chunksize, ChunkDivisions) ->
	[{chunk,0,Chunksize}|ChunkDivisions];
getChunkDivisions(File, Size, Chunksize, ChunkDivisions) ->
	if
		Size-Chunksize=<0 -> 
			ComputedChunkEnd = Chunksize-(Chunksize-Size),
			CorrectedChunkEnd = walkToNextLineBreak(File, ComputedChunkEnd),
			getChunkDivisions(File, 0, CorrectedChunkEnd, ChunkDivisions);
		true		 -> 
			ComputedChunkEnd = Size-Chunksize,
			CorrectedChunkEnd = walkToNextLineBreak(File, ComputedChunkEnd),
			getChunkDivisions(File, CorrectedChunkEnd, Chunksize, [{chunk,CorrectedChunkEnd,Size}|ChunkDivisions])
	end.

walkToNextLineBreak(File,Start) ->
	file:position(File, Start-1),
	{ok, Data} = file:read(File, 1024),
	Start+string:chr(Data, $\n).