Re: bug-grep Digest, Vol 6, Issue 71

[Edward Peschko]

>
> Obviously by my response I don't think something like that is needed.
> Is there a reason that you can't use one of the several existing
> methods?  Can you provide some examples where not having this feature
> is significantly problematic?
>

Sure..

1: suppose I want to build a 'project' file, which contains a list of
files that I care about - one that avoids temporary files, binary
files, etc. This would then be a very nice feature.

2. suppose - in this file, I want to pass commands to grep (in the
form of config flags, or something more fancy. Then this is a very
nice feature.

3. even with the find solution you are opening up multiple grep
processes per file which costs time. This feature avoids that overhead.

In any case, the 'arg list too long' problem being solved in
new versions of linux doesn't help me because it isn't cross
platform.

Ultimately, I have something like this in mind in the filelist I
wish to pass to grep:

-n
--expand-gzip
--expand-tar
/file1
/file2
/file3.tar.gz

or more fancy:

-n
<helper_command>:  /file1
<helper_command>: /file2

where helper command is a command that is
run on the file contents of /file1 before
being passed to grep..

Anyways, that's ok, I've implemented a bit hacky
way of doing this, so if it's unacceptable to
have this in the core, I have a workaround.

Thanks,

Ed