Fredrik Lundh wrote: > zcat|tail is a LOT faster.
and here's the "right way" to use that: from subprocess import Popen, PIPE p1 = Popen(["zcat", filename], stdout=PIPE) p2 = Popen(["tail", "-1"], stdin=p1.stdout, stdout=PIPE) last_line = p2.communicate()[0] (on my small sample, this is roughly 15 times faster than the empty for loop) </F> -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list