I am dealing with huge ascii text files (some go into 10GB in size)
that I wish to perform certain keyword/wildmask/etc searches which
will return all lines containing those keywords. I've went through a
couple of programs (such as Search and Replace) which were quite fast,
but not fast enough. Sometimes, it takes me up to half an hour to scan
through a GB of data, and when I need to do multiple searches a couple
of times a day -- a lot of time is wasted.

Thus here are my requirements:

Platform  : Windows
License   : Free or Commercial
Must be   :

1) EXTREMELY fast -- I can use Google myself, but I cant seem to find
reviews about the fastest software title.
2) Able to handle large file sizes -- from about 1GB to as much as 10GB
3) Able to use keywords (ex: "keyword"), wildcards (ex: "*eyword*",
"?eyword"), and/or/not (ex: "key" and "word", "keyword" or "keywords",
"key" and "word" not "keylockword") and such
4) Able to grab the matched lines and have the ability to save them
(some programs just display the results allowing you to only copy one
line, but not saving the results)
5) If possible with a GUI, if not -- command line is fine enough as
long as its fast.

I'd say "grep" port for win32 works 'OK' yet 'Search and Replace'
works quite as fast and others are even faster.

Help me find the software title, or perhaps an alternative method to
search these files speedily. I don't really need a list of the
software titles, as there are many to chose from -- and I can go
through them myself. I just need someone who might be able to find one
thats "the fastest".

This is quite important for me. Thus even if you try this task and
fail, I'll greatly appreciate the fact that you've tried.

Thank you for your help.

Maybe Textpad (you can download a free demo from www.textpad.com)
would meet your needs? This is an excellent multipurpose file editor.

If speed is your primary criteria, you may consider creating a
database and importing your text files into carefully structured
tables and creating indexes.

Brute force searching a large text file will almost certainly be
slower than searching a carefully indexed database.

good luck

Sounds like you can search through 1600 GB during working hours of a
single day only, and some terabytes more overnight (one a single PC).
You'll need some comandline based program that'll let you script your
searches so it can run overnight. The complexity of your searches
seems very low.
Could you tell us anything on why you would like to do such a thing...
and why the homeland security office can't find the solution itself?
;)

document123:

textpad will not do the job right.

font9a:

the problem is that the data cannot be sorted & indexed.
Otherwise, would you believe that importing the data into a database,
line by line, would allow for quicker searches?

xpertise:

what homeland security office? get off drugs.