Ay, but this was part of a list clean-up and we had lists that had NEVER been used in the log window. Believe me, I'll be celebrating when I see our current Listserv box drop off the top-20 page. FWIW- we're talking about 6 or 7 GB of logs. Bill Brown wrote: >> Once upon a time, I had to do something similar. I moved the logs to our >> research computing machine and wrote a multithreaded perl script to do >> the scanning and analysis. Using 6 of the 8 processors, the job took ~4 >> days to run, and that was with only about 10 months of logs. Hope your >> site doesn't see too much volume, and with 2 years of logs to search, I >> hope you have some cpu cycles to spare >> > > How big were the log files you were looking at? > > Since the goal of the original request was to see the last post in each > list, could you have jsut done "tail -50" (or whatever number would mnake > sense) on each log and processed the results of that rather than looking > at the beginning of the log since that info would be superceded by > subsequent lines in the log? > -- Christopher Wilson Information Systems Coordinator ISS Enterprise Systems The George Washington University 202-994-3878 [log in to unmask]