I am a Perl newbie and unsure if perl or awk is the right solution for my problem. Any advice will be much appreciated.

I am working on a tab-delimtied ASCII file with about 20 million records. Fields 15 and 16 of each record must be of fixed-length:
Field 15 -> always 5 characters
Field 16 -> always 7 characters

But there are a few bad records that don't meet this condition. My task is to filter these bad records into a separate file.

What is the most optimal way of determining this?
Note: When I ran a simple query (using awk) to find a specific primary key it took over 20 minutes to find the record.

-Kris

In reply to Performance challenges by Anonymous Monk

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