fgrep (isn't)

[Henry Spencer]

> Notice that plain old grep is the fastest of all, and fgrep is the slowest!

Sigh, it is well-known that fgrep is slow when searching for a single string.
You forgot to test egrep, which is well-known to be the fastest for the
trivial case.  Where fgrep makes a difference is when you want to search
for a number of strings simultaneously.  Grep can't do that at all, and 
egrep hits pattern-complexity limits quickly.  Fgrep really screams along
in this case.  I haven't tested bgrep et al yet.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry