bsdgrep status

[Dominic Fandrey]

In 2011 I substituted grep for bsdgrep in some of my more complex
shell scripts and ran into some issues. Though there never was a
reply to my e-mail these issues have evidently been fixed.

I'm tempted to conclude that bsdgrep is ready for deployment. Apart
from the performance standpoint. I repeated the following several times
the result is always about the same:

# time -h pkg_libchk.gnu
eclipse-3.7.1_4: /usr/local/lib/eclipse/configuration/org.eclipse.osgi/bundles/119/1/.cp/libswt-awt-gtk-3738.so misses libjawt.so
libreoffice-4.0.1: /usr/local/lib/libreoffice/program/xpdfimport misses libpoppler.so.18
        18m7.13s real           4m49.19s user           20m54.07s sys

# time -h pkg_libchk.bsd
eclipse-3.7.1_4: /usr/local/lib/eclipse/configuration/org.eclipse.osgi/bundles/119/1/.cp/libswt-awt-gtk-3738.so misses libjawt.so
libreoffice-4.0.1: /usr/local/lib/libreoffice/program/xpdfimport misses libpoppler.so.18
        20m30.75s real          5m10.25s user           22m6.71s sys

I cannot say how much of the runtime is caused by grep, but all the
difference is certainly made by grep and I think the difference is
significant.

It's maybe not bad enough to stop the switch, however it violates
the noble tradition of having command line tools that are faster than
the GNU equivalents. E.g. my latest AWK script is 7 times faster using
one-true-awk, compared to GNU AWK.

Compare bash and ash and you'll end up with a factor around 3 for scripts
that mostly use builtin commands.

Regards,
Kami

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