hardburn,
I have to completely disagree with you. The *nix utility grep is a compiled C program specifically designed for a single task. I worked very hard to modify tcgrep to be nearly as fast as the *nix grep. This only worked because of my very specific problem and still failed miserably in a general sense.

I am not sure what you mean by read normally instead of line-by-line. As best as I can tell, both Perl and grep see the file as a data stream. They read data into a buffer, they then process that buffer "line-by-line" by terminating on the newline character. The speed difference would be if the default buffer size is different - i.e. actual less physical reads as they only go back out to disk when the buffer is empty.

I agree that Perl offers all the functionality of the *nix grep and more, so resorting to using it for any reason other than raw speed seems like a bad idea. I would say that the reason not to use it isn't because of security or maintainability even though these are very valid points. To me, it is because of portability. This isn't even a matter of Win32 vs *nix portability - as can be seen in this thread.

Cheers - L~R

In reply to Re: Re: Re: Generating a grep command at run time by Limbic~Region
in thread Generating a grep command at run time by chimni

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.