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From: aperez@cvbnet.UUCP (Arturo Perez x6739)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: GREP vs. REGEX(3) (was: How wrong is MS-DOS?)
Message-ID: <1204@cvbnetPrime.COM>
Date: 14 Jan 91 16:01:51 GMT
References: <11234@lanl.gov>
Sender: postnews@cvbnetPrime.COM
Lines: 37

From article <11234@lanl.gov>, by jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles):
>> 	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.  For one thing, it saves
> the overhead of using pipes - passing the strings as procedure arguments
> is a lot more efficient (in this case, the pipe overhead is probably
> _bigger_ than the execution time of the whole pattern search).  Or, is
> my mention of the preference for library routines without mention of a
> specific name to be taken as significant ignorance.
> 
> J. Giles


Are you assuming that everyone in the world is a software engineer or programmer?

I, for one, have a lot better things to do with my time that rewrite grep
every time I need a search utility.

And system administrators need utilities like grep in order to build the
scripts, .com files and .bat files (for you ms-dos lovers :-) THEY need in
order to keep your machine running.

You can claim that you don't need a sys. admin on a single user machine 
like MS-DOS but someone still has to do that work.  And there is no
single piece of software that does everything a system administrator does
and does it the way YOU want it done.  

And most sites that have a lot of MS-DOS machines have a group of people
whose responsibilities it is to keep them running.

Arturo Perez
ComputerVision, a division of Prime
aperez@cvbnet.prime.com
Too much information, like a bullet through my brain -- The Police