Xref: utzoo comp.unix.aux:5014 news.software.b:8440
Newsgroups: comp.unix.aux,news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Minor incompatibility between Cnews and A/UX (possible Cnews bug)
Message-ID: <1991Jun26.152646.5011@zoo.toronto.edu>
Date: Wed, 26 Jun 1991 15:26:46 GMT
References: <1991Jun23.132007.10674@panix.uucp> <878@taniwha.UUCP>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology

In article <878@taniwha.UUCP> paul@taniwha.UUCP (Paul Campbell) writes:
>>Also, quite interestingly, I've discovered that egrep seems to be _much_
>>slower than grep at doing this.
>
>this is why there are 3 greps fgrep is faster than grep is faster than egrep,

Not true.  For small jobs, grep is sometimes the fastest of the lot,
competing with egrep, and fgrep is *dead last*.  For big jobs, egrep is
usually fastest *unless* you are searching for a bunch of fixed strings,
in which case fgrep wins.

The slow-egrep problem originally discussed here is a bug, not a feature.
-- 
"We're thinking about upgrading from    | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
SunOS 4.1.1 to SunOS 3.5."              |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry