fastest way to test file for string?

Hendrik van Rooyen mail at microcorp.co.za
Fri Jun 5 11:37:25 EDT 2009


"kj" <no.email at please.post> wrote:
> 
> Hi.  I need to implement, within a Python script, the same
> functionality as that of Unix's
> 
>    grep -rl some_string some_directory
> 
> I.e. find all the files under some_directory that contain the string
> "some_string".
> 
> I imagine that I can always resort to the shell for this, but is
> there an efficient way of doing it within Python?
> 
> (BTW, portability is not high on my list here; this will run on a
> Unix system, and non-portable Unix-specific solutions are fine with
> me.)

Use grep. You will not beat it's performance.

- Hendrik




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