If it is just a list of single values then 'a length of about 100-1000' and 'a start/end value anywhere between 1 and a few hundred million' are mutually exclusive.

I guess I phrased this poorly. It is not a list of single values, each element has two values: a start position, and an end position. What I meant was that the space these elements occupy can go up to a few hundred million (ie, with only a few hundred thousand elements it is fairly sparsely populated), but the length of each element (end - start) is usually no more than a few thousand.

Hope that clarifies it.

That said if it is just a list of values you are correct - grep or similar would be the way forward.

grep is the slow way to go, it not being good enough is why I am seeking the wisdom in the first place :)

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