accessing files

arunmep has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

hai everybody iam basically a biologist. iam developing a database for a particular plant. my problem is iam having a lot of text and pdf files i need to do create a search tools that will search all the files and give the files that have the given keyword. i want know is it be efficient to develop the tool in perl in terms of speed(searching 100's of files).please reply me

Comment on accessing files

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: accessing files by mpeters (Chaplain) on Jul 14, 2005 at 13:28 UTC
I would look at swish-e. It's an extemely fast and flexible tool for indexing and searching various kinds of documents (html, xml, text, pdf, doc, etc) and has a nice Perl interface. -- More people are killed every year by pigs than by sharks, which shows you how good we are at evaluating risk. -- Bruce Schneier	[reply]
Re: accessing files by blazar (Canon) on Jul 14, 2005 at 12:28 UTC
100's of files doesn't sound much like a thing that should scare perl. As far as text files are concerned, perl's own functions and operators are all that you need. For pdf files, you can search CPAN for pdf tools.	[reply]
Re: accessing files by straywalrus (Friar) on Jul 14, 2005 at 14:49 UTC
You may also want to take a look at 'Begining Perl for BioInformatics' by James Tisdall from O'Reilly. Although this does not specifically answer your question, it may help with future problems you have as a biologist. Check it out Here	[reply]
Re: accessing files by garrison (Scribe) on Jul 14, 2005 at 14:24 UTC
I use Perl to process thousands of PDF files and have no complaints about speed, although for maximal performance we store everything in a database and search that.	[reply]