Ok just tried it and it's not great for all occasions. Ex. i have a dir with 2 million files with an avg size of about 3 kilobytes. ls -f /data/ | wc -l

Ok just tried it and it's not great for all occasions. Ex. i have a dir with 2 million files with an avg size of about 3 kilobytes. ls -f /data/ | wc -l 2183060 So I try to find a pattern: time find "/data/" -name "*txt" -type f -print0 | LC_ALL=C xargs -0 -P 6 -n 40 fgrep -iq "let the right one in" real 0m3.755s user 0m3.085s sys 0m17.764s Then try sift with same command: time find "/data/" -name "*txt" -type f -print0 | LC_ALL=C xargs -0 -P 6 -n 40 sift -iq "let the right one in real 0m35.956s user 0m55.170s sys 3m32.120s Or try sift by itself: time sift -rq --files="*txt" "let the right one in" /data/ And it is: real 0m9.298s user 0m29.620s sys 0m12.371s Sticking with grep for now.