[geeks] regex question, I suppose...

Greg A. Woods geeks at sunhelp.org
Sat Aug 25 01:21:36 CDT 2001


[ On Friday, August 24, 2001 at 21:05:11 (EDT), dave at cca.org wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [geeks] regex question, I suppose...
>
> pwargo at basenji.com writes:
> 
> >Reminds me of the time I watched a scientist trying to do a search &
> >replace on a 5M sequence file using vi over NFS... He came to me in
> >frustration after 2 hours had passed... I showed him a single-line sed
> >that did it in 18 seconds...  Sometimes, the old ways are the best.
> 
> Of course if you can do it in one line of sed, then you can use the
> same command in vi...

and again wait for hours and hours and hours for vi to do what sed can
do in seconds.....

have you ever looked at what vi does when it changes a line?  What it
does internally makes all the fancy buffer-gap management and display
optimisation algorithms in fancier editors look like child's play!  ;-)

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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