This works great, thank you! I just benchmarked searching through a smallish file, using Perl pattern matching and grep.

Benchmark: timing 10000000 iterations of Grep, Perl...
Grep: 19 wallclock secs (16.38 usr + 0.03 sys = 16.41 CPU)
Perl: 101 wallclock secs (80.91 usr + 8.11 sys = 89.02 CPU)

What a difference!