grep replacement

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <23133 at bu-cs.BU.EDU> bzs at bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) writes:
>Almost, unless the original input was produced by a pipeline, in which
>case this (putative) post-processor can't help unless you tee the mess
>to a temp file, yup, mess is the right word.

The proposed tool would be very handy on ordinary text files,
but it is hard to see a use for it on pipes.  Or, getting back
to context-grep, what good would it do to show context from a
pipe?  To do anything with the information (other than stare
at it), you'd need to produce it again.  There might be some
use for context-{grep,diff,...} on a stream, but if a separate
context tool will satisfy 99% of the need, as I think it would,
as well as provide this capability for other commands "for free",
it would be a better approach than hacking context into other
commands.

By the way, I hope the new grep when asked to always produce
the filename will use "-" for stdin's name, and the context
tool would also follow the same convention.  Even though the
Research systems have /dev/stdin, other sites may not, and
anyway (as we've just seen) stdin isn't really a definite
object.