Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!maverick.ksu.ksu.edu!altair!jxf From: jxf@altair.cis.ksu.edu (Jerry Frain) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: How wrong is MS-DOS? Message-ID: <1991Jan13.010437.7212@maverick.ksu.ksu.edu> Date: 13 Jan 91 01:04:37 GMT References: <11234@lanl.gov> Sender: news@maverick.ksu.ksu.edu (The News Guru) Organization: Kansas State University Lines: 45 jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles) writes: >From article , by ppessi@niksula.hut.fi (Pekka Pessi): >> [...] >> See regex(3). So you are not ignorant about Unix? >No, I'm not. The existence of regex(3) _supports_ my prosition on grep. >That is: grep is a trivial tool that doesn't have any business being a >separate utility. In nearly every context where people recommend the >use of grep, regex() is a _better_ solution. This discussion is becoming absurd. I fail to see any logic in this argument. Perhaps someone would be kind enough to tell me what *exactly* justifies whether a tool has "any business being a separate utility?" Grep(1) is no more trivial than ls(1). Yet I doubt that you would question the existence of ls as a separate utility. I probably invoke grep from the shell at least twenty times daily. I do not wish to invoke a similar function from within any program (for those particular twenty invocations). I invoke grep from the shell because that serves my purpose best. Perhaps this is due to the nature of my job. I doubt it, since I know many people who also use grep from the shell quite often. Regex() would only be a better solution if one desired to create a built-in shell command which had the same features as grep. This, however, is impractical. Every shell (or other program which might find grep useful) would require its built-in grep utility, some possibly with different features than another. Why should I use ten different implementations of grep, when I can use the very same grep utility whenever I need? --Jerry -- Jerry Frain -- Systems Programmer Kansas State University Department of Computing & Info Sciences Internet : jxf@cis.ksu.edu Manhattan, Kansas UUCP : ...!rutgers!ksuvax1!jxf