Re: Should have used egrep
>>>>>> "Stephen" == Stephen Masterman <floyd@animals.mit.edu> writes:
>
> Stephen> I guess I should use egrep!
>
>I don't know if it is true for current implementations but one of the
>curiosities of early implementations of egrep was that, even though
>it is more general than grep, it was usually faster than grep on
>problems where they could both be used.
Well, under Debian we use GNU's version of the grep programs, and:
richard@sfere:richard$ ls -li /usr/bin/*grep
66907 -rwxrwxr-x 3 root root 61444 Mar 24 1995 /usr/bin/egrep
66907 -rwxrwxr-x 3 root root 61444 Mar 24 1995 /usr/bin/fgrep
66907 -rwxrwxr-x 3 root root 61444 Mar 24 1995 /usr/bin/grep
66825 -rwxrwxr-x 1 root root 1335 Mar 24 1995 /usr/bin/zgrep
richard@sfere:richard$
...they're all the same file. So they perform identically, the syntax
is just slightly different (RTFM for more information). I would be
unsurprised if commerical UNIX implementations still have the
properties you describe, however.
--
Richard Kettlewell
richard@elmail.co.uk http://www.elmail.co.uk/staff/richard/
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