[lug] Command-Line search through thousands of files?

[Paul Ohm]

I tried sending this a few months ago, but I think it never arrived. 
Let me try again...

I have more than 20k (growing every day) small text files (e-mail
messages in separate files using mh!) that I occasionally
need to search through at the command line.  Grep is too slow for my
tastes with this many files, so I was hoping to find a good indexer plus
command line search tool.  I'd love to use something powerful like
Lucene, but it seems like Lucene comes with a lot of extra cruft and
overhead if all you are doing is command line searching.

Any tips?

Paul Ohm