Re: grep

[Stepan Kasal]

Hello,

On Mon, Mar 31, 2003 at 02:22:12PM +1000, Malcolm Johnston wrote:
> 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

there may be several reasons:
1) the use of Unicode complicates things---try setticng LANG=C and LC_ALL=C
for your tests.  See ``man locale'' for details.

2) the system regex library in last few releases of glibc is much more
POSIX compliant and much more slow.  The effectivity should improve as
new releases come.  To get the good old not so correct but quicker
regex code, get sources for grep (src rpm) and recompile it, with
the option --with-included-regex given to the configure script.

HTH,
        Stepan Kasal