Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2001 13:00:07 +0000 From: Paul Robinson <paul@akita.co.uk> To: chat@freebsd.org Subject: fgrep - a quirky question for you all Message-ID: <20011030130007.D38696@jake.akitanet.co.uk>
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Not really something for -questions as it's not really a problem. More a vote, I reckon. fgrep searches files for a fixed character string. It doesn't search for patterns, just strings. It's very good at it too, and there is sometimes a performance improvement. However, after googling around we still haven't been able to resolve a small argument in this neck of the woods which is likely to turn into something larger than the editor (emacs vs. vi) wars of the last millenia unless we cap it now. You can stop this getting out of hand, and all you have to do is answer one question: What does this 'f' in fgrep stand for? Now, everybody I ask says 'fast', although I seemed to remember reading about 3 years ago in a dusty manpage somewhere (probably an Irix box I think) it meant 'fixed'. The question came up again when we started looking into how fgrep actually works. We now know GNU fgrep is 'fast grep' but there are loads of FAQs I've seen scattered around (google: how does fgrep work) that say it's fixed grep. We then attempted to do a 'hit score' to resolve the situation on search engines. Here are my results: Search Engine Fast Grep Fixed Grep --------------------------------------- Google 71,100 62,800 Google Groups 15,200 15,000 Yahoo 33,400 29,500 Lycos 555 616 Webcrawler 908,850 219,940 The last two lines confirm what I always suspected - Lycos and Webcrawler are pants. However, the other results are all very similar looking, with a slight edge to 'fast' rather than 'fixed' - not enough to be conclusive however. My colleague has resorted to searching through source code and Changelogs to find the answer, to no avail. And so, gentleman (and ladies of course), your input is now required in an attempt to resolve an argument that could turn into something bigger than the Perl vs. Shell-script trolls. Let's find an answer together for the good of mankind, or at least Usenet! :-) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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