Re: What does Emacs on w32 know that grep can't figure out?

[Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Oct 1, 2010 at 2:37 AM, Juanma Barranquero <lekktu@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 1, 2010 at 02:29, Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I actually think that there is no grep etc that handles this kind of
>> files on w32. Is there on *nix?
>
> I don't know. I don't use *nix (though I sometimes use GNU/*ux, but I
> haven't needed to grep utf-16 files).
>
>> Using grep is an integral part of Emacs.
>
> Relatively speaking. In thirteen years of Emacs use I've grepped from
> inside Emacs perhaps twice.


In those a bit less years I have used Emacs regularly now I guess I
might have used Emacs two times without using grep from within Emacs
;-)


>> If grep does not support the
>> coding then that part of Emacs will fail.
>
> Absurd. It's up to you to look for a grep that will grok the files you
> want to search. grep is not included with Emacs.


If the tool chain is broken then the tools that depends on it are also
broken. Aren't they?

(And commands two use Emacs are actually included in the Emacs manual!)


>> Yes, but that does not help if you have a lot of files you want to search.
>
> Bad luck. You can always use an elisp script to convert them all.


Yes, but that is a quite unfortunate state IMO. New users will just
say "ah, this tool is broken, let us try something else".

And I think they are right if we can not cure a problem such as this.