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

[Gordon Ross]

On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 11:53 PM, Albert Lee <trisk at opensolaris.org> wrote:
> On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 10:52 PM, Yuri Pankov <yuri.pankov at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, May 05, 2011 at 10:21:09PM -0400, Gordon Ross wrote:
>>> I have mixed feelings about seeing uncompress support in grep.
[...]
Yuri:
>> Think of archives as just another type of file. grep's purpose is to
>> match lines in files (of different kind) and it does just that - using
>> those libraries to look inside compressed files. It is especially useful
>> when doing recursive grep. Just how I see it, anyway.
>>
Albert:
> The motivation here is that grep's design, and the design of Unix
> tools that traverse directory trees in general, is not sufficiently
> flexible to implement this with a filter.

So, that's a fair point.  One might wish for a "search" tool that can
"look inside compressed files" and the like.  I get that.  But is that
program grep?  Where do you stop with adding advanced search
features to grep?  Should it's FTW be able to expand compressed
tar files and traverse within those too?  (why not?:)

I'm a little uncomfortable with trying to make grep into that larger
"advanced search" tool.  I think I'd prefer a separate "tree walk"
tool that could run grep on a series of files, some of which might
be burried inside *.tar.gz files or whatever...

>>> Note that these options cause grep to drag in
>>> libzlib and libbz2 for the decompress support.

Which maybe is not so bad, perhaps those should be in the
illumos gate anyway (to satisfiy other dependencies).

But even if libz,libbz were there, I like the separability
and extensibility of (for example) letting the user specify
some program for grep to run to "expand" files...
(maybe a much smarter program, that can figure  out
what kind of file it is, etc.)  Not now, but maybe later.

Gordon