How to Work on Large Log files in Windows

Posted on October 27th, 2014 by wilson

I had to search through a 400++ gb squid proxy log file. The problem here is that you can’t use Notepad or Wordpad on such a large file. It wont open due to the large size.
Quick idea: use GREP command to filter out the large file into a smaller workable file. The problem is that there is NO GREP command on the windows server. Thankfully, WINDOWS does have an equivalent though — Findstr command to the rescue.

So i opened a command prompt and entered:

findstr “string-to-be-search” filename.ext > result.txt

This gave me a smaller file that i could work with. Other ideas to try is to find the UNIX date string and use it to filter the log file into the date range you want to work with.

Hope this helps others.

Filed under: Computing

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