[thelist] question about parsing large files

[Cameron McCormick]

Hello,

in one of my projects, I end up with large status reports (these are ~40,000
lines) I need to parse each days report against the previous days, to find
out which items are no longer in the list.

my question is what would be a good way to do this?

Im thinking one of the following:
use grep in reverse mode to see what is not in the second list?

or... store the lines in a mysql database and query against the previous
day?

the questions that come up are,
with grep, is there a way to make it check against a whole file of strings,
the examples I can find are for grepping against one argument.

with the database, is there some easy query to get just the differences, or
am I going to have to query against the whole list for each line in the new
file? (this would probably take a long time)

any help or suggestions is appreciated...

thanks,
Cameron

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