[illumos-Developer] grep -Z etc? (decompress! was: webrev: 650 grep support for -q ...)

[Kurt Lidl]

On Fri, 2011-05-06 at 01:17 -0400, Gordon Ross wrote:
 > On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 12:04 AM, Garrett D'Amore <garrett at 
nexenta.com> wrote:
 > > I have very mixed feelings about introducing these dependencies.  But
 > > perhaps its time to consider bring these libraries into ON?
 > >
 > >        - Garrett
 > >
 >
 > Or it could just fork off a "gzip -dc" (or whatever) when it needs to
 > decompress something.  I took a stab at that (diff attached).
 > I did not use popen due to concerns about passing file names
 > with nasty characters to the shell...
 >
 > Gordon


I like this *much* better.

     - Garrett

Forking off a copy of 'gzip -dc', and then having to copy all the compressed
data through a pipe to gzip, and then having to copy all the uncompressed
data back through the pipe to grep is slow.

Yes, I know, it's "common" to do this, but it really stinks, 
performance-wise.
Integrating direct usage of the libgz (or libz or libbz or liblzma when 
the time
comes) is a huge performance win.

-Kurt

(my apologies in advance for the badly formatted response text)