Hi, M Douglas McIlroy wrote on Tue, Nov 17, 2020 at 07:29:14PM -0500: > Somebody asked:
>> If I'm not mistaken, Research-era AT&T Unix had a look(1) >> command which was explicitly for quick-and-dirty text >> database application. I expect a Murray Hill veteran or >> Plan 9 maven could say more. > There's not much to say. "Look" did binary search in a file > of one-line entries. Its main use was to check the presence > of (prefixes of) words in dictionary lists, particularly > /usr/dict/words. As machines got faster, "look" lost its speed > advantage over "grep", which performs much more general search > and doesn't require ordered data. FWIW, modern BSD base systems still contain the tool: https://man.openbsd.org/look http://man.bsd.lv/FreeBSD-12.0/look http://man.bsd.lv/NetBSD-8.1/look http://man.bsd.lv/DragonFly-5.6.1/look All the same, like Doug, i guess fewer people actually use it nowadays. Yours, Ingo
