Minor incompatibility between Cnews and A/UX (possible Cnews bug)

[Henry Spencer]

In article <1991Jun23.132007.10674 at panix.uucp> alexis at panix.uucp (Alexis Rosen) writes:
>The Cnews "queuelen" script varies depending on which type of uucp your
>system has. The seemingly correct version to tell Cnews about is "ancient"...
>... here is the way it should look:
>	ls | egrep "^C\.$site$grade.....\$" | wc | awk '{print $1}'
>	                           ----^
>
>A/UX has a _really_ _BAD_ UUCP, it's true, but I doubt that they bothered
>to hack the code just to add one more character to the UUCP file names...

Somebody did, somewhere.  I can assure you that a truly ancient uucp had
only four characters in that position in the names; I ran such a uucp for
nearly a decade.

>Also, quite interestingly, I've discovered that egrep seems to be _much_
>slower than grep at doing this...
>...true on a Unix-PC, and it's true on Macs as well. Perhaps it's
>System V-dependant? Or is this just a special case where egrep is unusually
>slow?

On my system the difference is too small to measure.  It may be a SysVism,
although it has always been true that grep can be faster than egrep for
complex patterns on small inputs.
-- 
"We're thinking about upgrading from    | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
SunOS 4.1.1 to SunOS 3.5."              |  henry at zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry