[H-GEN] Mega documentation and distro server. Was: Idea for journalling filesystems

[Greg Black]

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On 2003-07-02, Jason Parker-Burlingham wrote:
> Anthony Towns <aj at azure.humbug.org.au> writes:
> > On Wed, Jul 02, 2003 at 01:17:52AM -0400, Jason Parker-Burlingham wrote:
> >> Hmm.  Right now grep -ri does a credible job.  Actually that raises an
> >> interesting question for Greg Black---Greg, how do you go about doing
> >> recursive greps?  If I remember correctly you eschew nonstandard
> >> options such as (I assume) -r.  I've never found a particularly
> >> compelling find+grep combination.
> >
> > What's uncompelling about:
> >     find -type f | xargs grep 'blah'
> 
> I'm not particularly fond of xargs, I guess.  

But it is the Unix tool that was invented to solve just this
kind of problem -- it has so many uses that I am constantly
amazed to find that people shy away from it.  Its principal
problem, historically, has been a poor man page -- it's one of
those cases where some proper examples that show how it's useful
would have made a big difference.

> When I get to a point where other people might use it I tend to whip
> up something in Perl instead.

This always makes me go "Ick".  Why create new Perl monsters
when the standard tools will do the job?  (Yes, that really was
rhetorical and there's no need for the Perl weenies to explain
yet again why Perl is the answer to every question in the known
universe.)

To return to the original question, what's wrong with glimpse?

Greg (who has spent many hours looking for a funny shaped power
      supply for his wife's computer and ended up buying a new
      funny shaped case with a power supply and carefully
      hammering all the components from the old computer into
      the new case, only to be told at the end of the day that
      it's now too noisy -- all this because a big power outage
      around here last night let all the magic smoke out of the
      original power supply)

-- 
Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net> <http://www.gbch.net/gjb.html>
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