>> Is there some advantage to supporting regular expressions?
> 
> Yes, because if you don't know the exact string you're looking for, you 
> can specify a more general string that is likely to be found.

Surely this almost never actually works though?

> I use it several times a week myself, reasons include chat log files in 
> my IM client where I might need to find a conversation I've had in the 
> past about something.  I recently was trying to remember the name of an 
> internal website, but I couldn't remember who I had talked to about it or 
> the website name.  I was able to use grep to find what I needed in a 
> matter of seconds without searching (checks - "find -type f | wc -l" - 
> 8694 chat log files across all the different IM protocols I use).
> 
> Doing that by hand would be very tedious and would take days, and even 
> then, I might not find what I was looking for.

As I say, not the kind of thing I ever need to do. (Although 
occasionally I wish it was possible to search this newsgroup...)

>>> As Warp said, you also can traverse a directory structure with grep to
>>> find the file(s) that have the string in them.
>> I didn't know that. I thought grep was just for searching within one
>> file.
> 
> If I tell you the 'net is wonderful resource for information, what will 
> you say in response?  ;-)

Suffice it to say that since I don't need grep, I hadn't deeply 
researched its capabilities. (I only recently discovered that it's a 
search tool, for example.)

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