grep, etc

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Tue, Aug 17, 2004 at 11:08:11PM -0400, Brian K. White wrote:
> Fairlight wrote:
> > Sweet.  I should grab that.  :)  Basically a -useful- egrep.  :)
> > Well, egrep is useful, but not as useful as it otherwise could be.
> 
> I'd say the plain old stock sco grep was useful, since it aswered the need
> very directly in one command without especially exotic options or a
> pipeline. Didn't even require the stock egrep let alone gnu grep or
> pcregrep.

Well, except that it *didn't* fulfill the requirement of the poster who
started this thread, without a big ungainly pipline wrapped around it.

> Just because something fancier becomes available, doesn't automatically and
> retroactively make the previous thing useless.

Nope.  As demonstrated by said ungainly pipeline.

> Especially if the newer more feature bloated thing is larger, less portable
> or less easily portable (libraries), slower, more of a cpu hog, etc...
> 
> I'd be interested in performance benchmarks of gnu grep or pcregrep vs plain
> stock grep. I wouldn't be surprized if the stock plain grep is faster and/or
> less of a cpu hog. I wouldn't be surprized if gnu grep was faster either I
> guess, hence the implication to test.

Difficult to benchmark a program as lightweight as grep, but I suppose
a test suite could be developed.  In general, though, I'd speculate
that *very* few people care about it's performance, speed-wise.  If you
do care, you code it yourself.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
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