use Perl

• What's wrong with grep (Score:2)

  by bart (450)

  .. and the reason I'm interested in alternatives, is the option to specify file extensions (or more general: file name patterns) for the files to search in, specifically for recursive mode.
  
  grep depends on the shell to expand globs into a list of filenames, and this breaks down when your start descending into directories.
  
  • Re: (Score:2)

    by Ovid (2709)

    There's nothing wrong with grep. However, it's a different tool that attempts to satisfy a different need. I often want to search parts of a Perl document without searching all of it. Being able to search just through DATA sections or perhaps dump all regular expressions can be hand. You may have different needs. As time goes on, I'll be adding new features and it will be even more useful.

    Also, I was going to add file extension support, but I decided to put that off as "not needed" for the first iter
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by Alias (5735)

    If you just need a smarter grep, without the ability to understand Perl, you might want something like ack.
    
    
• pgrep (Score:2)

  by miyagawa (1653)

  Nice work, but the name 'pgrep' is not probably the best one since there's a conflict. [wikipedia.org]
  • Re: (Score:2)

    by Ovid (2709)

    Ah, crud. I hadn't heard of the command, so I didn't think to search for it. Thanks for the heads up. Recommendations welcome!
    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Aristotle (5147)

      plgrep?
      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Aristotle (5147)

        Hmm, that’s taken too. But ppgrep isn’t. Google only finds someone who uses that as their nickname and a page showing a Perl script called ppgrep that isn’t mentioned anywhere else.