Replacing GNU grep revisited

Sean Farley sean-freebsd at farley.org
Sun Jun 22 09:41:08 PDT 2003


On Sat, 21 Jun 2003, David Schultz wrote:

> dds@ has expressed some interest in compiling the FSMs for regexps
> into native code, which would make it blazingly fast.  See cvs-all at .
> As a practical matter, there are only a couple of zealots who care
> what kind of license grep is under, so replacing GNU grep with
> something that's ``almost as good as GNU grep'' is a regression IMO.
> If we were talking about a kernel module or library, of course, that
> would be a different matter.

Let me clarify.  As far as I have been able to find out, the big
hold-out on not considering FreeGrep was that it was too slow.  I got
the time to be comparable.

Reasons to consider for switching:
1. GNU's grep -r option "is broken" according to the following post.
   The only thing I have noticed is that FreeGrep has more options for
   controlling how symbolic links are traversed.
   http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=lang_en&ie=UTF-8&selm=xzp7kchblor.fsf_flood.ping.uio.no%40ns.sol.net

2. GNU's grep is using libgnuregex.  The speed-up by dds@ would not be
   felt?

3. FreeGrep gives one less thing for zealots to complain about.  :)

Sean
-----------------------
sean-freebsd at farley.org


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