Usenix: Dartmouth expanding diff, grep Unix tools

[Fred]

With some funding from Google and the U.S. Energy Department, a pair of computer scientists at Dartmouth University are updating the venerable grep and diff Unix command line utilities to handle more complex types of data. Such updates are needed because "we now tend to have more model-based configuration languages that have meaningful constructs spanning more than one line," said Gabriel Weaver, a Dartmouth graduate student who, along with Dartmouth computer science professor Sean Smith, is creating the variants of grep and diff. Weaver presented the new utilities at a poster session at the Usenix Large Installation System Administration (LISA) conference, being held this week in Boston.

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