note Polyglot I've implemented this approach, as it seems fairly close to the sort of solution I was looking for. Unfortunately, it is still rather slow. I started the process 2.5 days ago now (it's been running over 60 hours) and it is about half-way through the material. So it appears with this method it will take 5 days of 100% CPU on one of four cores of my Dell PowerEdge server. That's a little disappointing. My ugly approach, which may be slightly less thorough, finished after about three days. So it was 40% quicker. <p>Given the complexity of the regex, I suppose I cannot blame perl or the program itself, it's just the way it is. But without the attempt to narrow the search to finding numbers between their respective forerunners/postrunners, the whole search can complete in less than five minutes. <p>Anyway, at least I have learned something and I much appreciate your patience in demonstrating this method for me. I may still be able to use this as a final check over a long weekend or something, or perhaps I can limit the amount of material to be checked at a time (~130 books total). Thank you! <!-- Node text goes above. Div tags should contain sig only --> <div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-644375"> <p>Blessings, <p><i>~Polyglot~</i> </div></div> 996728 996788