fastest way to test file for string?

Fri Jun 5 22:19:45 EDT 2009

On Fri, 05 Jun 2009 17:37:25 +0200, Hendrik van Rooyen wrote:

> "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.

What makes you think that performance of the find itself is the only, or 
even the main, consideration?

-- 
Steven