GNU grep is one of my go-to tools on any Linux box. But grep isn’t the only tool in town. If you want to try something a bit different, check out glark a grep alternative that might might be better in some situations.
What is glark? Basically, it’s a utility that’s similar to grep, but it has a few features that grep does not. This includes complex expressions, Perl-compatible regular expressions, and excluding binary files. It also makes showing contextual lines a bit easier. Let’s take a look.
I installed glark (yes, annoyingly it’s yet another *nix utility that has no initial cap) on Linux Mint 11. Just grab it with apt-get install glark and you should be good to go.
Simple searches work the same way as with grep: glark stringfilenames. So it’s pretty much a drop-in replacement for those.
But you’re interested in what makes glark special. So let’s start with a complex expression, where you’re looking for this or that term:
glark -r -o thing1 thing2 *
This will search the current directory and subdirectories for “thing1” or “thing2.” When the results are returned, glark will colorize the results and each search term will be highlighted in a different color. So if you search for, say “Mozilla” and “Firefox,” you’ll see the terms in different colors.
You can also use this to see if something matches within a few lines of another term. Here’s an example:
glark --and=3 -o Mozilla Firefox -o ID LXDE *
This was a search I was using in my directory of Linux.com stories that I’ve edited. I used three terms I knew were in one story, and one term I knew wouldn’t be. You can also just use the --and option to spot two terms within X number of lines of each other, like so:
glark --and=3 term1 term2
That way, both terms must be present.
You’ll note the --and option is a bit simpler than grep’s context line options. However, glark tries to stay compatible with grep, so it also supports the -A, -B and -C options from grep.
Miss the grep output format? You can tell glark to use grep format with the --grep option.
Most, if not all, GNU grep options should work with glark.
Before and After
If you need to search through the beginning or end of a file, glark has the --before and --after options (short versions, -b and -a). You can use these as percentages or as absolute number of lines. For instance:
glark -a 20 expression *
That will find instances of expression after line 20 in a file.
The glark Configuration File
Note that you can have a ~/.glarkrc that will set common options for each use of glark (unless overridden at the command line). The man page for glark does include some examples, like so:
after-context: 1 before-context: 6 context: 5 file-color: blue on yellow highlight: off ignore-case: false quiet: yes text-color: bold reverse line-number-color: bold verbose: false grep: true
Just put that in your ~/.glarkrc and customize it to your heart’s content. Note that I’ve set mine to grep: false and added the binary-files: without-match option. You’ll definitely want the quiet option to suppress all the notes about directories, etc. See the man page for more options. It’s probably a good idea to spend about 10 minutes on setting up a configuration file.
Final Thoughts
One thing that I have noticed is that glark doesn’t seem as fast as grep. When I do a recursive search through a bunch of directories containing (mostly) HTML files, I seem to get results a lot faster with grep. This is not terribly important for most of the stuff I do with either utility. However, if you’re doing something where performance is a major factor, then you may want to see if grep fits the bill better.
Is glark “better” than grep? It depends entirely on what you’re doing. It has a few features that give it an edge over grep, and I think it’s very much worth trying out if you’ve never given it a shot.
