Cheap way to search a large text file for a string

Question

I need to search a pretty large text file for a particular string. Its a build log with about 5000 lines of text. Whats the best way to go about doing that? Using regex sho

Answer 1

If there is no way to tell where the string will be (first half, second half, etc) then there is really no optimized way to do the search other than the builtin "find" function. You could reduce the I/O time and memory consumption by not reading the file all in one shot, but at 4kb blocks (which is usually the size of an hard disk block). This will not make the search faster, unless the string is in the first part of the file, but in all case will reduce memory consumption which might be a good idea if the file is huge.