[vamoose]

grep is my pick. There's not a day that does by when I don't rely on grep to do something useful.

My first PC was an Apple ][ w/ 8K (8192 bytes) of RAM. Serial number 2752. Had to load/store programs from cassette tape. Apple's floppy disk drive wasn't available until 3 months later.

[avg_freeper]

"grep is my pick"

I use grep constantly too. I deal with a lot of output files from an engineering structural analysis. There are many post processing tools to filter out specific pieces of information. But if I need to know something unique about the results I grep it out.

I left sed in there even though I've started using perl command line more often.

Anything that I've been doing with let's say:

sed "s/regex/stuff/" file

I can do with

perl -p -e "s/regex/stuff/" file

and I even have the option of in-place editing with -i

But the biggest reason is that my "time" tests of perl line processing beats sed for large files.