jpcardoso,

I'm glad I could help you, but I also have to agree with the other monks about waiting 5 minutes for a response. That's a really long time on the web today. Most users expect responses in seconds, not minutes. Doing this lookup with 'ajax' would be nice, but it would also be a lot of work.

Maybe, let us help you with the real problem -- having to 'grep' on a 'bz2' file. Perl is very good at reading a file and searching ( 'index' ). Several generic fixes come to mind, but some more information about the data(bz2 file) would help us give you some better options.

But just in case you can't get around the 'grep', you could schedule it and immediately return a HTML page informing the user that it will take 'x' minutes to get a response and to check back in a few minutes. Provide a link to check on the status. Once the response is available, return the current page that you are returning now.

You may also want to look at the problem of denial of service (DOS) with longer time-outs. The apache web site describes this in detail. Better to plan now, than get the web site finished and then have a DOS attack.

Best of Luck...Ed