Looking for lots of words in lots of files

[Martin P. Hellwig]

Kris Kennaway wrote:
<cut>
> 
> If you can't use an indexer, and performance matters, evaluate using 
> grep and a shell script.  Seriously.
> 
> grep is a couple of orders of magnitude faster at pattern matching 
> strings in files (and especially regexps) than python is.  Even if you 
> are invoking grep multiple times it is still likely to be faster than a 
> "maximally efficient" single pass over the file in python.  This 
> realization was disappointing to me :)
> 
> Kris

Adding to this:
Then again, there is nothing wrong with wrapping grep from python and 
revert to a pure python 'solution' if the system has no grep.
Reinventing the wheel is usually only practical if the existing ones 
aren't round :-)

-- 
mph