| > Era Eriksson suggested to Mike Rose,
| > | You can probably get a bit better results with POG (plain ole grep :-)
| > | since it doesn't need the overhead of egrep's extended syntax.
And I commented:
| > No, that won't work for Mike's situation, because POG generally does not
| > support the -f option for reading a set of search expressions from a file.
| > POG needs to be told a single expression on its command line.
Era rejoined:
| Not true for GNU grep.
Well, no, but we were talking about POG, and GNU grep is not POG. Since --
as Era mentioned -- GNU uses a single binary for grep, egrep, and fgrep (and
decides behavior by the name you call it under), its "grep" face supports a
-F option to make it act like fgrep and a -E option to make it act like
egrep. So I'd hardly classify it as POG.
Additionally, note that I said "generally", but I still maintain that any
grep that supports "-f file" to search for any of the strings or patterns
in a separate file is not plain old grep.
GNU grep, though, is a good suggestion for Mike (and Mike has said that it
has taken care of his problem) because, unlike POG, it supports -f, and
unlike egrep, it doesn't support the RAM-eating needs of extended regexps.