Split or Rearrange Large Logs and Data Sets

PowerGREP handles huge files without breaking a sweat. You’re only limited by the size of the drive you want to store your files on. But other applications may perform poorly on large files, or even crash on files larger than 2 GB or 4 GB. With PowerGREP, you can easily split large files into multiple smaller files. The new files could be numbered and each have a fixed number of entries. You could split large monthly logs into smaller daily logs.

You can even take things one step further to rearrange or recombine files. When splitting multiple files, PowerGREP allows you to use the same target files for multiple source files. You could split monthly logs into weekly logs. without worrying that matches from two monthly log files may need to go into the same weekly log file. PowerGREP combines them automatically. You could even “split” weekly logs into monthly logs or rearrange daily system logs (one log for all users) into monthly user logs (one log for each user).

Splitting files works like a search and replace except that the “replacement” is the target file that the match should be written to. You can use regular expressions to build the target path based on parts of the search match. You can use match placeholders to count matches and number files. Using file sectioning you can split files along lines or records or anything you can match with a regex, while using another regex to extract part of the line or record such as a date to determine its target file. PowerGREP’s help file includes plenty of examples that demonstrate all of this.

The opposite situation may also arise. Other applications may create large numbers of small files that would be stored more efficiently as larger files. With PowerGREP you can easily merge many files into fewer larger files. This works in the same way as splitting files. The only difference is that each source file is written entirely to the target file. The target file’s path can be fixed or based on regex matches and numbered placeholders.

There are two ways in which you can get your own copy of PowerGREP and evaluate the software risk-free.

The best option is to buy your own copy of PowerGREP for US$ 159. Your purchase is covered by Jan Goyvaerts's personal three month risk-free unconditional money-back guarantee. This allows you to try the software without any limitations and without any risk for three months.

Alternatively, you can download the free evaluation version of PowerGREP. The free evaluation version can be downloaded anonymously. It allows you to explore PowerGREP for 15 days of actual use. Full documentation is included. The documentation extensively covers both PowerGREP itself, and the regular expression syntax.