grep or ack

to get your results faster you can use ack, it has nearly all commandline options like grep and behaves quite similar to grep (so the output will mostly be the same)

the biggest difference is the speed
dump.xml contains 12mb of sniffitzt xmldata with newilnes
time ack 42 dump.xml > /dev/null
real 0m4.005s
user 0m3.030s
sys 0m0.250s

time grep 42 newlinedump > /dev/null
real 2m57.371s
user 2m55.760s
sys 0m0.980s
and beside this i quote from their homepage:

Command name is 25% fewer characters to type! Save days of free-time! Heck, it's 50% shorter compared to grep -r.

here is the homepage, there are 11 additional points, why ack is better then grep http://petdance.com/ack/