grep replacement

[Tim Bray]

>In article <7207 at watdragon.waterloo.edu> I wrote:
>}Grep should, where reasonable, not be bound by the notion of a 'line'.
...
>}The source is scattered inconveniently.  The obvious thing to do is: 
>}grep -l _memcpy *.o
>}That this often will not work is irritating.

At least a dozen people have sent me alternate ways of doing this, the 
most obvious using 'nm'.  Look, I KNOW ABOUT NM! But you're missing the 
point - suppose the item in the .o files was another type of string, e.g.
an error message.  

The point is:  There are some files.  One or more may contain a string in
which I am interested.  grep -l is a tool which is supposed to tell me whether
one or more files contain a string.  The fact that it refuses to do so for 
a class of magic files is a gratuitous violation of the unix paradigm.
Tim Bray, New Oxford English Dictionary Project, U of Waterloo