Editing & greping undelimited data

[Bruce Hamilton]

I find Unix with its line orientation to be only a tiny 
bit more advanced than systems that only handle 80-column
card images.  I don't understand why the common utilities
can't deal with pure character streams and treat \n the 
same as any other character -- that's what Xerox XDE and 
ViewPoint/GlobalView do.  Instead of dealing with 
"lines", just print out a "context" consisting of a 
user-specified number of characters on either side of the
search string. 

Anyhow, my immediate gripe is: grep doesn't work on 
undelimited files.  I'd like to be able to use it to 
search my XDE mail file table-of-contents files.  Those 
files consist of fixed-length, undelimited records.  
Should I use the perl "read" command to break up these 
files with a \n at the end of each record to make grep 
work?  Any other ideas?

Please copy me by e-mail, as I seldom read this newsgroup.

Thanks,

-- 
--Bruce
Xerox Corp., 101 Continental Blvd. ESC1-611, El Segundo, CA 90245
BHamilton.LAX1B at Xerox.COM
213/333-3538