grep, etc

[Bill Vermillion]

> Fairlight wrote:
> > You'll never BELIEVE what Bill Vermillion said here...:
> >>
> >> After having no power for 95 hours, and expecting it to be out for
> >> at least 3 more days, things are running here again.

> > Congrats!  Good to have you back, man...

> >> You mentioned you didn't learn on GNU greps originally.

> > Nope.  BSD 4.3.

> >> You might check into pcregrep.   It is defined as 'a grep with
> >> Perl-compatible regular expressions'.

> > 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 grep on this system [FreeBSD] is the Gnu Grep at 52K.
THe pcregrep is 9960 bytes.  Both have shared libraries.

> Just because something fancier becomes available, doesn't
> automatically and retroactively make the previous thing
> useless. Especially if the newer more feature bloated thing
> is larger, less portable or less easily portable (libraries),
> slower, more of a cpu hog, etc...

Nobody said abandon one to use the other.  The more tools you have
the better off you are.   A good carpenter has seveal saws,
hammers, etc.  While the rest of us usually only have one of each.

> 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.

You have it pgregrep on your FreeBSD so you can test it yourself.
The Gnu grep has 6 hard links here.  

Bill

-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com