4 ms·

I think he should have attributed more importance to regular expressions. They don't even get mentioned, beyond being implied by grep.

• patio11 18y ago
  You can grep for regular expressions? I think my mind just got blown. For the last ten years I've been finding them with awk. awk '(/putithere/) {print $0}'
  • thamer 18y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grep http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grep grep is a command line text search utility originally written for Unix. The name is taken from the first letters in global / regular expression / print, a series of instructions for the ed text editor. grep -rHnE 'my [r]eg+ex' /path/to/folder/ : look for files with this regular expression recursively and print out their name and the line number, as well as the matching line itself. Awk might do it, or you can -exec it with find, but I've read several times that grep is generally faster, even faster than a simple search with a custom and non-optimized C program.
  • gaius 18y ago
    The re in grep means "regular expression".