Thanks for the suggestions, I will make some comments here. I see that I did not provide nearly enough context again, sorry about that.
To start, almost all records in the file start with ^S. There are 1,053,062,790 records in the file so I simply cannot grep for "^S" because over a billion records will be retrieved. Secondly I do NOT have 24+ gigs of memory, to load the file into RAM and search that way. Scott's suggestion: grep -f /tmp/sides.txt bigfile.txt Where sides.txt is a list of all items you'd like to search for, one per line. might work, I will give it a try and see how well it executes. I am thinking of setting up multiple grep commands, using about a 1,000 patterns to match in each grep command. Once again, thanks for the tips. _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
