Researchers Expanding Diff, Grep Unix Tools

itwbennett writes "At the Usenix Large Installation System Administration (LISA) conference being held this week in Boston, two Dartmouth computer scientists presented variants of the grep and diff Unix command line utilities that can handle more complex types of data. The new programs, called Context-Free Grep and Hierarchical Diff, will provide the ability to parse blocks of data rather than single lines. The research has been funded in part by Google and the U.S. Energy Department."

Comments

Re:Follow the money...?

[Tanktalus]

Context-free grep/diff can be used to search for data/changes in arbitrary non-line-record-based files. Such as XML, HTML, JSON, SQLite databases, other databases, Apache configs, and many other pieces of data. Heck, even most programming languages are not line-based, but statement terminated/separated. Imagine being able to grep for a function name, and getting its entire prototype/usage even when it spans multiple lines (very common in standard glibc headers). And, depending on the plugin's capabilities, you could grep for a function name as a function name and not get back any usage of that text as a variable or embedded in a string, or a comment (skip commented-out calls!).

If there's sufficient configurability, you could ask for the entire block that given text is in, and such a grep would be able to display everything in the corresponding {...}. Makes grep that much valuable.

So, my question is, why aren't more IT-heavy corporations/government departments not involved?

Re:Strange names

[jd]

You have to figure in two's complement notation. If it's sufficiently counter-intuitive, the sign bit flips over and it becomes totally intuitive.