Researchers Expanding Diff, Grep Unix Tools

itwbennett writes "At the Usenix Large Installation System Administration (LISA) conference being held this week in Boston, two Dartmouth computer scientists presented variants of the grep and diff Unix command line utilities that can handle more complex types of data. The new programs, called Context-Free Grep and Hierarchical Diff, will provide the ability to parse blocks of data rather than single lines. The research has been funded in part by Google and the U.S. Energy Department."

Link to one of their papers on these tools

[treerex]

http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR2011-705.pdf [dartmouth.edu]

RTFA?

[DragonWriter]

funded in part by Google and the U.S. Energy Department

I wonder what's the interest of these two in this.

FTFA:

Google's interest in this technology springs from the company's efforts in cloud computing, where it must automate operations across a wide range of networking gear, Weaver said. The DOE foresees that this sort of software could play a vital role in smart grids, in which millions of energy consuming end-devices would have connectivity of some sort. The software would help "make sense of all the log files and the configurations of the power control networks," Weaver said.

Re:Strange names

[mytec]

According to this paper [dartmouth.edu], they are called bgrep and bdiff.

Re:Strange names

[EdIII]

and I really should spend a few more seconds thinking about what I'm responding to

That's not what Slashdot is about........