Re^3: Is there a definitive module for efficiently searching a collection of text files?

[Marshall]

You said: "I'm only dealing with a few hundred files at most."

I would forget about optimizing. Do what is the easiest thing for you to implement. I think you are looking at well less than a minute, maybe even just some ten's of seconds. Also, since these are only relatively small text files (software source), the file will probably be in disk cache if you need to read it again.