Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!bellcore!faline!thumper!ulysses!andante!alice!andrew From: andrew@alice.UUCP Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: "dd conv=unblock cbs=80 - really grep replacement" Summary: grepping non-text files Keywords: grep replacement Message-ID: <8024@alice.UUCP> Date: 5 Jul 88 09:11:48 GMT References: <144@insyte.UUCP> <3350@phri.UUCP> <8168@ncoast.UUCP> <58590@sun.uucp> Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill NJ Lines: 13 the job of grep is to search text files which have a conventional structure of \n terminated lines (note current greps may or may not print matching last lines without a trailing \n). what should grep do when it finds no such newline within shouting distance of a match? obviously (to me) it should complain about line too long. but can it produce useful output? in general, yes. my feeling is that it should print some window around the match (say 256? bytes) so that users can use the -b (hopefully meaning byte offset) to find out where the match really is. this way, normal input is not affected (either semantically or performance) and people with non-newline (BUT text) input can put together a script to do what they want.