Grepping a huge file (80GB) any way to speed it up?

Question

 grep -i -A 5 -B 5 \'db_pd.Clients\'  eightygigsfile.sql

This has been running for an hour on a fairly powerful linux server which is otherwise not

Answer 1

Two lines of attack:

• are you sure, you need the -i, or do you habe a possibility to get rid of it?
• Do you have more cores to play with? grep is single-threaded, so you might want to start more of them at different offsets.