bigbot

I don't think anyone here would tell you that a perl script could/would be faster than a "highly" optimized C program ( I could be wrong ). And there is nothing wrong with using the system command 'grep' to produce your solution.

But if you still want to improve the execution time, some things to look at:

• In your test script you used the regex match
  $matchCount++ if ($_ =~ /$string/o);

  however in this case, a simple "index" test should be faster

• If you read blocks of data ( read or sysread ) you would decrease the difference between grep and perl, but now the complexity of you script has increased.

All of these improvements are nice, but is it worth spending the time to debug the improved script to gain 'nn' seconds at execution time. That is your call -- balancing your time efficiency versus the script efficiency. Chapter 24 of The Camel book does an excellent job of explaining the trade-offs.

Good Luck

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.