text file search help

A

Austin

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Apr 19, 2000
Messages
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Hello, and thank you for checking out my thread. Here is my dilemma.

I have a directory of text files. Each text file contains bank statements for my work's pension fund investments for any given month. I have 6 years worth of data in monthly data. The file names are the date of the information EX 1999-04.txt. The directory of these text files is about 5 gigs in size.

I am currently using the Windows search feature to search for stock cusips (alphanumeric string of text) to investigate holdings for class action lawsuits. The resulting list of file names tells me which statements contain transactions or holdings for this security. I can then pull the reports and print the required pages for filing.

The problem is that searching 5 gigs of text takes around 10 min for each security and while searching my PC is pretty much useless.

I am looking to come up with a batch file or VB script that will search the directory for a cusip and output a list of files containing that cusip to a text file. Preferably it should be able to do this for multiple cusips without me intervening. I am hoping to run this overnight so I don't look valuable PC time while I am at work.

I have investigated VB scripts and DOS commands, but honestly I lack the expertise to get this done. Any assistance or pointing in the right direction is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
 
You probably need to convert all that text into a database and index it. That should greatly speed up searching. I'm not sure if access will be able to handle it, but that's the direction I would look into.
 
Thank you all for your help. I wish I had a Linux box. Maybe IT will let me install Fedora on one of our old boxes.

I tried importing the files into access, but it crashes everytime. Sucks!
 
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