Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!mtunx!whuts!homxb!mtuxo!mtgzz!avr From: avr@mtgzz.att.com (XMRP50000[jcm]-a.v.reed) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: new grep Summary: Please make the flags orthogonal and consistent Message-ID: <4219@mtgzz.att.com> Date: 21 Jun 88 18:29:38 GMT References: <16237@brl-adm.ARPA> Organization: AT&T, Middletown NJ Lines: 34 In article <16237@brl-adm.ARPA>, williams@nrl-css.arpa writes: < Al Aho and I are designing a replacement for grep, egrep < and fgrep. The question is what flags should it support and < what kind of patterns ... < < I have always thought it would be nice to print only the first match. < (Root Boy) Jim Cottrell< I'll second this. There have been many times when I simply wanted to < detect the presence of a pattern in a file, then stop searching. Combining < this with the -n option can also be useful. This would be a good time to make the flags orthogonal and consistent. Ideally, all standard output should be requested in the same way, by specifying the corresponding flag. The default should be something like the -s option today; the way to specify one's own favorite options would be by defining an alias, e.g. mygrep="grep -i -l -n -m" The options I'd like to see are: -l List paths (names) of files with matches -n Number: list numbers of lines that match -b Block: list block number for each match -m Matching lines: list matching lines -c Display a count of maching lines in each file -o One: Don't search beyond one match per file plus the -v, -i, -e, and -f options as they are now. Ideally, there should be a new name; if the new tool is called with one of the names that exist today, then the behavior of the old tool of that name ought to be emulated exactly. Adam Reed (mtgzz!avr)