grep replacement

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <23142 at bu-cs.BU.EDU> bzs at bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) writes:
>Anyhow, at least we're back to the technical issues and away from
>calling anyone who disagrees Neanderthals...

Oh, but the latter is much more fun!

Anyway, the fundamental issue seems to be that there are (at least)
two types of external data objects:
	streams -- transient data, takes special effort to capture
	files -- permanent data with an attached name
UNIX nicely makes these appear much the same, but they do have some
inherent differences, and this one-pass versus multi-pass context
discussion has brought out one of them.

There is nothing particularly wrong with the "tee" approach to
turn a stream into a file long enough for whatever work is being
done.  The converse is often done; for example many of my shell
scripts, after parsing arguments, exec a pipeline that starts
	cat $* | ...
in order to ensure a stream input to the rest of the pipeline.