Replacing GNU grep revisited

[Sean Farley]

In January, Pedro Giffuni started a thread about replacing GNU's grep in
the system.  Interestingly, I did not know about the grep thread on
hackers until later.  James Howard had interjected in February with
mention that he had gotten patches to speed up freegrep.  I had sent him
those patches in late January, but I have not heard from him since.
Hopefully, he is OK and just busy.

I have placed the patches up on Geocities¹ for others to try out.  They
get freegrep fairly close to the performance of GNU's grep.  Also
included is a small patch to regex to squeak a bit more performance out
of it, but I am not certain if it actually helps or not.

BTW, Postgres is using a newer version of the regex library--swiped from
TCL--that FreeBSD uses.  It supports multibyte characters.  Is it time
for an update?

¹ http://www.geocities.com/sean_farley/

Sean

P.S.  Please Cc me as I am not on the list.
-----------------------
sean-freebsd at farley.org