grep

[Malcolm Johnston]

I am running RedHat 8.0 on an AMD Athlon XP 2100+ platform, and grep,
while it works, is about 25 times slower than it was on my Pentium II
450. For instance, the pattern '[^\na]a?\.(bc|d-g)+$' takes about 0.75+
of a second compared to 0.040; the pattern ''[Oo]ne|[Tt]wo|...up to
[Ee]ight' takes over three seconds.  Perl and awk and even I program I
wrote with the help of a book are all a lot faster; even when the
pattern is just literals grep is still just as slow.  Any thoughts?

                                                Dr Malcolm Johnston