At work, I had the need to parse through a large pipe-delimited file to count the number of records whose 5th column meets and doesn’t meet my criteria.

  
 gc items.txt -readcount 1000 | `  
 ? { $_ -notlike "HEAD" } | `  
 % { foreach ($s in $_) { $s.split("|")[4] } } | `  
 group -property {$_ -ge 256} -noelement | `  
 ft -autosize  

This command does what I want, returning output like this:

  
Count   Name
-----   ----
1129339 True
2013703 False

Here’s some explanation in English, for those of you who don’t know PowerShell.

The first command is gc (Get-Content), which reads the file in 1000 (readcount) lines at a time.

The second command is ? (Where-Object), which filters out the HEAD row.

The next command % is an alias for Foreach-Object, where object in this case is a 1000-line chunk. The inner loop is another foreach loop, which is slightly different from Foreach-Object in ways that are unimportant to the matter at hand. Point is, you can’t nest % blocks. The block of the foreach loop splits each line by pipe delimiter and returns just the 5th column (first column is numbered 0).

The next command in the chain is group, an alias for Group-Object, in this case we’re grouping by a calculated property, whether the output of the previous command is greater than or equal to 256. By saying “-noelement”, I’m saying I don’t need an enumerated list of the values, which in this case are unimportant.

Finally, we get to ft (Format-Table). It is necessary because the Count column may be over 99999, in which case the value is truncated. The option “-autosize” causes PowerShell to make it fit instead.

However, for a 500 MB test file, this command takes about 5.5 minutes to run as measured by Measure-Command. A typical file is over 2 GB, where waiting 20+ minutes is undesirably long.

I posted a query to StackOverflow for some ideas.

While I waited, I discovered that 2500 was the optimum value for -ReadCount, getting the command execution time down to about 3.5 minutes.

Within minutes, I got a helpful hint from Gisli to look into using the .NET StreamReader. Here’s what that Show-SourceCounts script looks like:

  
param($file = $(Read-Host -prompt "File"))  
$fullName = (Get-Item "$file").FullName  
$sr = New-Object System.IO.StreamReader("$fullName")  
$trueCount = 0;  
$falseCount = 0;  
while (($line = $sr.ReadLine()) -ne $null) {  
  if ($line -like 'HEAD|') { continue }  
  if ($line.split("|")[4] -ge 256) {  
    $trueCount++  
  }  
  else {  
    $falseCount++  
  }  
}  
$sr.Dispose()  
write "True count: $trueCount"  
write "False count: $falseCount"  

This script yields the same results as the first command, but in about a minute. Quite an improvement!