With a 100Mb file and 50+ strings to search for, there could be some speed advantage to forking separate processes for each search string and letting them run in parallel. Especially, if the regexen are precompiled before forking.

Of course, the sheer simplicity of merlyn's solution probably more than compensates for the overall savings in time through the use of parallelism, when you realize that the tricky task of gathering up the individual counts from each of the child processes is not as straightforward as it may at first glance appear.

dmm

You can give a man a fish and feed him for a day ...
Or, you can teach him to fish and feed him for a lifetime

In reply to Re(2): some forking help by dmmiller2k
in thread some forking help by JohnATmbd

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