30 meg? Bah, that's small. 500 meg? Meh, not small, but not large, either.

However, if you're concerned, I would still copy the files locally, just to cut down on network transmission from repeated searches. If that's not something you want to do, you could create a perl script that did all the searches based on File1, and run that over ssh.

Finally, you could just create a perl script that you put on to each server that you could interact with, and, using IPC::Open2, you could send it queries to do on the remote machine, and it would send replies back...

TIMTOWTDI isn't just a perl maxim, it applies to all of unix ;-)