Waste of memory? Memory is there to be used ... what are you saving it for?

Sure, for a long-lived application may want to be leery of using a large quantity of ram. But if it solves the immediate problem at hand, then using memory isn't really a problem. Also, memory is so large anymore that you need to work with *big* files if you're going to make memory usage a problem. The ordinary file isn't really going to be a problem.

For example, here's a histogram of file sizes on a couple of my machines--my work laptop (LT0186) and my goofing off computer (Boink):

I wouldn't take a second thought about just loading a file under 500M into RAM, and as you can see, I have *very few* files larger than that. And for a simple task like the one presented, I'd probably go ahead and try it on larger files (swap space permitting) and go take a break.

...roboticus

When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.

Waste of memory? Memory is there to be used ... what are you saving it for?

seriously? This entire "program" is a joke -- grep does it already

I'm not talking about this program specifically, I was simply responding to the "a waste of memory" statement.

...roboticus

When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.

Unless I'm mistaken, the Solaris grep doesn't support -B -A or -C and there's no native grep on Windows.