Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!henry From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) Newsgroups: net.news.b,net.unix Subject: Re: grepping for "Subject" in /usr/spool/news Message-ID: <4414@utzoo.UUCP> Date: Thu, 4-Oct-84 11:26:42 EDT Article-I.D.: utzoo.4414 Posted: Thu Oct 4 11:26:42 1984 Date-Received: Thu, 4-Oct-84 11:26:42 EDT References: <4003@elsie.UUCP> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology Lines: 18 > .... Folks may recall articles > that went around a while back asking why "grep" wasn't smart enough to use > the "fast fgrep" algorithm when appropriate. The above results show that > grep may be smarter than was thought. It's been well-known for quite a while that fgrep is the slowest of the three greps for simple cases. It really shines only when the list of words it is looking for is substantial, in which case it is much faster than the others (assuming you can even convince the others to work under those conditions). The Bell folks are rumored to have developed/discovered a new matching algorithm that invalidates the "we don't know a single algorithm that spans a wide enough range of space-time tradeoffs" comment in the grep manual page; anybody know anything about this? References? -- Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology {allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry