[ Thanks to Amy Bennett for this link. ]
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.