Word-oriented GREP
Felix Lee
flee at cs.psu.edu
Mon Apr 29 18:21:03 AEST 1991
>why not cut down your search space by using grep to find the lines with
>the matching patterns and then using perl, or some other unix tool to grab
>the pattern.... from the previous example you could do:
>grep V\[0-9\]\[0-9\]\[0-9\] fred.c | tr ' ' \012 | grep V\[0-9\]\[0-9\]\[0-9\]
Well, yes, you can do that if you want a word-oriented grep.
My point was, I don't want a word-oriented grep. I don't want a
line-oriented grep either. I want a character-oriented grep, a grep
that will just grab matching substrings from an arbitrarily stream.
And from this tool you can do word-oriented or line-oriented or
whatever-oriented grepping.
With the current line-oriented grep, you cannot search for a pattern
that spans lines. Say you want to find occurrences of "the dog" in a
file, where the words can be separated by any whitespace, including
newlines. You cannot do this easily with existing tools.
--
Felix Lee flee at cs.psu.edu
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