On: Why GNU grep is fast (2010)

[z3t4]

Grep is a damn useful tool, I use it every day. But is it just me or does grep sacrifice convenience for performance ? Eg. it rather skips some bytes, then to make sure it finds everything. And case sensitive is default, where you most of the time want to find all case variations.

[burntsushi → z3t4]

No. Skipping bytes is only done when you can prove there isn't a match. Please see my other comments in this thread.

If you want case insensitive matching by default, then use:

    alias grep="grep -i"