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From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards,comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: grep replacement
Message-ID: <8022@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: 5 Jun 88 03:30:46 GMT
References: <136@rubmez.UUCP> <449@happym.UUCP> <7944@alice.UUCP> <8012@brl-smoke.ARPA> <23133@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) )
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 22

In article <23133@bu-cs.BU.EDU> bzs@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.