Just my curiosity. Can python beats perl at speed of grep-like processing?
$ wget http://www.gutenberg.org/files/7999/7999-h.zip $ unzip 7999-h.zip $ cd 7999-h $ cat *.htm > bigfile $ du -h bigfile du -h bigfile 8.2M bigfile ---------- grep.pl ---------- #!/usr/local/bin/perl open(F, 'bigfile') or die; while(<F>) { s/[\n\r]+$//; print "$_\n" if m/destroy/oi; } ---------- END ---------- ---------- grep.py ---------- #!/usr/bin/env python import re r = re.compile(r'destroy', re.IGNORECASE) for s in file('bigfile'): if r.search(s): print s.rstrip("\r\n") ---------- END ---------- $ time perl grep.pl > pl.out; time python grep.py > py.out real 0m0.168s user 0m0.149s sys 0m0.015s real 0m0.450s user 0m0.374s sys 0m0.068s # I used python2.5 and perl 5.8.6 -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
