in reply to Searching many files
You could significantly speed up your end-users search by implementing a vector-spaced search engine.
If you don't want to build the engine yourself then perhaps you would want to hire a company specializing in this kind of search. See this businessweek article that talks about a couple of firms specializing in legal search.
Also you say that you don't have "grep" on Windows...well you can download the grep portion of Cygwin and call grep from perl system calls.
metadoktor
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