On Fri, 23 Apr 2010 09:04:37 +0100, Invisible wrote:

>>> 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?

Obviously I'd prefer to spend my time doing something that "almost never 
actually works", right?  (IOW, the fact that I do in fact do this should 
demonstrate to you that it *does* actually work more often than not, 
because I'm not likely to waste my time doing something that is unlikely 
to work).

>> 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...)

That's actually something I do use it for as well - I've been known to 
scrape newsgroups with a perl script, dump the contents, and then use 
grep to parse the output file to find a message I was looking for based 
on something in the message text.

>>>> 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.)

Well, perhaps you would benefit from using it (perhaps not), but just 
because you weren't aware of its capabilities, you never considered it as 
an option to accomplish a task.  It's only natural that one wouldn't use 
a tool that might be well suited for a task if one doesn't know about the 
tool or fully understand its capabilities.

Jim

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