It's also a hideously inefficient way to use grep(1). For a file with 50k characters and 30k matches, grep uses over 430MB of memory, and is about 2.3 times slower than using sed(1), assuming that the machine doesn't start swapping while grep is running.
Lucky 512 megs is standard these days ;)
Reminds me of this job interview I went to a few weeks ago, where the guy said to me "if it is running too slow (talking about their product), our customers are the kind where they'll just go out and buy a new server... so we don't bother optimising because it is not worth our time."
I wanted to bang his head on a 486. They were C# developers. Strictly MS. Heh.
Tim.
