Yesterday I was faced with a 21 megabyte text file that needed several find/replace operations. Tex-Edit would open the file, but not change it. BBEdit would chug through the changes, but it was taking forever. I dropped into a Terminal window and used:
perl -pi -e 's/find/replace/g' filenameHowever, this too was slow -- much slower than I expected.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2002022622554549