In article <1436587.Q3l6MkZcx3@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> __/ [ Tim Smith ] on Wednesday 03 May 2006 04:04 \__
>> One thing to keep in mind, though. If you need to do anything that you
>> can't very quickly see how to do in grep or sed or whatever, then it
>> often will be faster to write a little Perl script, rather than dig
>> through the zillion options of grep, etc., trying to find the
>> combination that does what you want.
>
> Au comtraire. In defence of grep, its basic use is simple enough to appeal to
> command-line newbies:
>
> grep file 'search phrase' (or regular expression, if you must)
>
> This is quicker to do than opening a file, opening search prompt/widget, then
> entering phrase. Also, grep is less computationally hungry.
Uhm...where did opening widgets come from?
> Then come to consider extensibility, recursion, batch mode (including
> scriptability), and multi-file operations. When someone sought the code of
> an error message in WordPress, for example, I immediately ran:
>
> grep -r * 'error message substring'
>
> to find the line in a file within a subdirectory.
>
> That's not too complex, yet the level of expressiveness is high.
It's not too complex. Unfortunately, it's also not correct, as you got the order
of arguments wrong. :-)
--
--Tim Smith
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