aperez@cvbnet.UUCP (Arturo Perez x6739) (01/15/91)
From article <11234@lanl.gov>, by jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles): >> See regex(3). So you are not ignorant about Unix? > > No, I'm not. The existence of regex(3) _supports_ my prosition on grep. > That is: grep is a trivial tool that doesn't have any business being a > separate utility. In nearly every context where people recommend the > use of grep, regex() is a _better_ solution. For one thing, it saves > the overhead of using pipes - passing the strings as procedure arguments > is a lot more efficient (in this case, the pipe overhead is probably > _bigger_ than the execution time of the whole pattern search). Or, is > my mention of the preference for library routines without mention of a > specific name to be taken as significant ignorance. > > J. Giles Are you assuming that everyone in the world is a software engineer or programmer? I, for one, have a lot better things to do with my time that rewrite grep every time I need a search utility. And system administrators need utilities like grep in order to build the scripts, .com files and .bat files (for you ms-dos lovers :-) THEY need in order to keep your machine running. You can claim that you don't need a sys. admin on a single user machine like MS-DOS but someone still has to do that work. And there is no single piece of software that does everything a system administrator does and does it the way YOU want it done. And most sites that have a lot of MS-DOS machines have a group of people whose responsibilities it is to keep them running. Arturo Perez ComputerVision, a division of Prime aperez@cvbnet.prime.com Too much information, like a bullet through my brain -- The Police