PS the right tool for textfile manipulation?

Hi,

This is my first post here. Im a powershell beginner, but also a unix shell script programmer for 10 years (20 years ago).

I used to manipulate text files with unix shell scripts. Which was fast enough. Now i am facing a fixed width text file with 23 mln records/lines.

I was wondering, if PS is fast enough to handle large text files?

Otherwise i am forced to learn ACL.

Thanks for your time.

Guus

Assuming you mean 23 million records\lines, yes that is a large file. :slight_smile: There are numerous articles that discuss processing large files in Powershell, like this one:

This is relative as you are not really providing requirements or a measure of how fast it can be done in Shell for comparison, but youll need to test what you are attempting to do. As far as manipulation, Powershell supports multiple methods to fully parse and manipulate text from Select-String to Regex.