Firstly, your regexp /.*$search_value*/ will not do quite what you think. If $search_value is 'abc', the string "xyzab" will match, since the trailing * is applied to the 'c' in your resulting pattern. The regular expression will also cause your code to die if $search_value has characters that goof up the regexp compilation. 
chomp(@file_array);
open(RECENT, ">>$installpath/recent");  # or just >
foreach $filename (@file_array) {
   open(FH, "< $filename") or warn "Could not open $filename: $!";
   while (<FH>) {
      if (/$search_value/o) {
         print RECENT "$search_value=$filename--> $_";
         $numhash{$search_value}++;
         $matched++;
      }
   }
   close(FH);
}
close(RECENT);

[download]
We move the RECENT file stuff outside of your loop, since it makes little sense to keep re-opening the file for every line we want to write. I imagine that's a major source of your speed problems. Since $search_value doesn't change, we optimize the regular expression with the /o switch. If you wanted to forget about subsequent matches in a given file, you could add a last statement inside your loop, which would skip to the next file instead of reading the rest of the current file, but it seems like you're interested in each line that matches.

If your 'recent' file is a temporary/transient thing, used only for processing later in your script, you might also want to consider just storing your matches in an internal data structure, and use them later instead of reading from your file: 

push(@{$search_results{$search_value}->{$filename}}, $line);

[download]
Of course, don't underestimate the simplicity of doing this without Perl, if that's all you have to do. The 'grep' command can perform this task natively, unless you need to do some additional processing on the data, and aren't just building a 'recent' file with text matches.

In reply to Re: Faster way? by Fastolfe
in thread Faster way? by the_slycer

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