"Cameron McCormick" <lawngnome007 at hotmail.com> wrote in message news:F21k7IdIpjPmoExxBYh00017ba9 at hotmail.com... > 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. If these status reports contain identical lines and only differ by a couple of selective lines, then I would suggest the diff utility. It's used by programmers to figure out what changes to a given source file have been made since the last revision and in conjunction with patch to create source updates, and is especially designed for scanning large text files differing by only a couple of lines. See http://www.opennc.org/onlinepubs/7908799/xcu/diff.html for details. -- Regards, Jackson Yee jyee at vt.edu http://www.jacksonyee.com/