Peng Yu wrote: > I'm want to grep some online files below. Instead of downloading the > files, I want to grep them online. Is there an option in grep or some > tools that are similar to grep that can search online files directly? > > ftp://hgdownload.cse.ucsc.edu/goldenPath/mm9/database/
Of course you can use 'wget' or 'curl' or other downloader pass the contents to grep. That may be sufficient for what you want. But what you said was "instead of downloading the files". You can't grep locally without downloading the file by some method and providing it to grep. And you can't search remotely unless a remote search interface is provided. There isn't any way to magically avoid one or the other. Bob
