Re: [PATCH/RFC 0/4] grep: support to match by line number

[Bert Wesarg <bert.wesarg@googlemail.com>]

On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 18:38, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> I am personally not thrilled by what this series attempts to do, but first
> a few questions:
>
>  - Are there existing non-git "grep" implementations that do this?

I didn't know of any, until Jakub mentioned the ack tool. And I didn't
look for one. I will answer you 'yes'-questions only in context of my
proposal.

>
>  - If yes:
>   - what command option letter do they use to specify line number?

I have no strong argument for -@, it was short and -l and -L are
taken, but I wont use this that often on the command line, so a long
option like '--line=' is ok for me too.

>   - do they not support a range notation (e.g. -@ 25-30,32-40)?

That was already on my todo list and also mentioned in the last paragraph.

>   - what do they do when given more than one file?

Like the content patterns, they try to match.

>
>  - If no:
>   - why not?  Is it a sign that this is ill-thought out misfeature?

Printing only some lines of a file isn't that hard, and there are
obviously some standard tools which do this fine, but combining this
with the -C and --show-function feature isn't easy. So extending grep
with this feature sounds like the best bet.

>   - perhaps people use something like "sed -n -e 25,30p file" and be
>     happy?

How would you combine this with git grep HEAD or with multiple files?

Bert