[clue] updating grep? (talk)

[Mike Bean]

I almost hate to see them mess with it.  It's just so....omnipresent,
but I guess it makes sense, how long has grep been around?

Bean

http://www.itworld.com/software/231515/usenix-dartmouth-expanding-diff-grep-unix-tools

Usenix: Dartmouth expanding diff, grep Unix tools

Dartmouth researchers are working on variants of diff and grep that
can parse more complex data structures

By Joab Jackson, IDG News Service |  Software, diff, Google 2 comments

December 08, 2011, 5:40 AM — With some funding from Google and the
U.S. Energy Department, a pair of computer scientists at Dartmouth
University are updating the venerable grep and diff Unix command line
utilities to handle more complex types of data.

Such updates are needed because "we now tend to have more model-based
configuration languages that have meaningful constructs spanning more
than one line," said Gabriel Weaver, a Dartmouth graduate student who,
along with Dartmouth computer science professor Sean Smith, is
creating the variants of grep and diff. Weaver presented the new
utilities at a poster session at the Usenix Large Installation System
Administration (LISA) conference, being held this week in Boston.

The new programs will allow administrators to extract meaningful data
from configuration files, log files and other sources of operational
data, the researchers maintain.