dragffy.com » grep http://dragffy.com/blog The development, documentation, and blogging domain of Gabriel Dragffy. Wed, 16 Nov 2011 11:17:43 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.2 Grope, a Ruby script for enhanced Grepping http://dragffy.com/blog/posts/grope-a-ruby-script-for-enhanced-grepping http://dragffy.com/blog/posts/grope-a-ruby-script-for-enhanced-grepping#comments Wed, 19 Mar 2008 17:56:54 +0000 Gabe http://dragffy.com/blog/posts/grope-a-ruby-script-for-enhanced-grepping There was a time when I would recursively grep the contents of literally thousands of files at a time to search for particular occurances of characters. The usual starting place was something using grep, which we can time for crude benchmarking:

user@localhost$ time grep -rn 'hello' *
templates/temp.tpl:1:hello

real 1m56.190s
user 0m1.400s
sys 0m0.940s

Using Ruby to write a script, which I named Grope, I made the search process 450 times faster, reducing an operation that took more than a minute to taking a blink of an eye…

user@localhost$ time grope 'hello'
templates/festival/06/temp.tpl: 1
hello...

real 0m0.181s
user 0m0.100s
sys 0m0.070s

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