Power of windows command shell I managed to use just pure windows command shell scripting to process around 500M text data .... pure means not external exe/com files needed,,, just windows built-in commands (e.g. for, call, if ... ) amazing,,, windows scripting (*.bat, *.cmd) can just do almost anything... it is as powerful as linux shell script... ok ,, here is the task.... there is a csv file,, let's say A.csv, which contains something like this... 1 5 2 18 0 24 18 0 54 2 5 3 18 1 14 18 1 44 3 5 4 18 2 2 18 2 36 4 5 5 18 3 1 18 3 31 5 5 6 18 4 0 18 4 45 6 5 7 18 5 10 18 5 59 7 5 8 18 6 19 18 7 6 ... ... the first column is id the second is x co-ordinate the third is y co-ordinate and the rest are start-hour, start-minute, start-second, end-hour, end-minute, end-second the first job would be list all the files following this pattern "EOS20081217hmshms" between the intervals recording by A.csv for example, 18 0 24 18 0 54 you need to get the list of files between EOS2008121800.spa to EOS2008180054.spa (files exist and in this time interval) what is spa file ? a spa file is a text file ... i've got few thousands of them... we are only interested in part of spa file... say from line 564 to 1114 they look something like this. P_0=-131.268000 , 3524.995001 MHz P_1=-127.844000 , 3524.995019 MHz P_2=-135.736000 , 3524.995037 MHz P_3=-135.956000 , 3524.995055 MHz P_4=-137.352000 , 3524.995073 MHz P_5=-135.692000 , 3524.995091 MHz ... ... ok,,, among this data,,, we need to find out the maximum value of the first number right after "=" among these numbers.. in P_0 to P_5,, the maximum value is -127.844000 after that,,, we need to list these max numbers into B.csv 1 5 2 16 -58.06 -56.756 -55.236 -56.464 -56.264 -56.348 -56.228 -56.456 -56.092 -57.02 -56.688 -56.48 -57.82 -55.792 -54.372 -56.616 each row of B.csv would be in the format of id, x, y, number of spa files, max value of spa file1, max value of spa file2 ... ... that is it,,, not an easy job, right? :) hint: for statement is very power,,, just few "FOR" does the job!