Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!iuvax!bsu-cs!dhesi
From: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Why fgrep?
Message-ID: <5025@bsu-cs.UUCP>
Date: 8 Dec 88 21:24:35 GMT
References: <1050@naucse.UUCP>
Reply-To: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi)
Organization: CS Dept, Ball St U, Muncie, Indiana
Lines: 16

In article <1050@naucse.UUCP> sbw@naucse.UUCP (Steve Wampler) writes:
>In every machine I've played with, fgrep has never
>performed better than plain old grep for any data I've given
>it (and on some machines, it is *considerably* slower).

It performs well if you have a large number of strings to look for.
For example:

     cat longfile | fgrep -f stoplist | other_stuff

In one experiment on a VAX-11/785 (4.3BSD), with 470 entries in
'longfile' and 20 search strings in 'stoplist', fgrep did it in 2
seconds real time while egrep took 10.  User/system cpu times were
correspondingly different.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi         UUCP:  !{iuvax,pur-ee}!bsu-cs!dhesi