Re: Replacing GNU grep revisited

["James P. Howard II" <howardjp@vocito.com>]

Chris Costello said:
> On Sunday, June 22, 2003, Sean Farley wrote:
>> 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
>
>    A workaround for this problem in the meantime would be to use
>
>      find <directory> -type f | xargs grep EXPR
>
>    Just FYI.

Rumors of my demise are greatly exaggerated.  And to call myself busy any
more is an understatement.

But yes, I got an email from Ted Unangst telling me about the OpenBSD move
to FreeGrep and this pleases me greatly.  I have been glancing over thier
CVS tree (via the web) and they have made a number of changes to fix the
bugs being discussed here.  Aside from a handful of errors (which are
presumably correctable), the speed is still an issue.

It is horribly slow when compared to the GNU version.  FreeBSD will see
better times than OpenBSD due to some changes made to the regex code a few
years ago which I adapted from the 4.4BSD-Lite2 code for grep, but it
still lags behind GNU in performance.

Jamie