grep, etc

[Bill Campbell]

On Wed, Aug 18, 2004, Bob Stockler wrote:
>On Wed, Aug 18, 2004 at 11:07:34AM -0400, Bob Stockler wrote:
>| 
>| I would guess that "mawk" would be faster than "grep" in certain
>| circumstances, especially when searching a large file, because
>| it could be made to exit after reading the lines to be matched.
>
>Example:
>
>  [trebor] ~bob: time grep '^factory$' /usr/dict/words
>  factory
>
>  real    0m0.11s
>  user    0m0.06s
>  sys     0m0.01s
>  [trebor] ~bob: time mawk '/^factory$/{print;exit}' /usr/dict/words
>  factory
>
>  real    0m0.06s
>  user    0m0.01s
>  sys     0m0.00s

The ``mawk'' script cheats as it exits when it finds a match while grep
passes the entire file.

Bill
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