Re: suggestion for binary search output

[Walt Pawley]

Walt Pawley wrote:

>Another approach, perhaps much better than the original suggestion,
>would be to have an option to suppress all found text ... leaving
>only the output from other options. Or, make --context=NUM treat
>NUM=0 as meaning no text.

Preface: I am not a C maven - almost, but not quite, a complete C illiterate.

Thinking this might not be so hard to do myself, I d/l'd the
source to take a look at it. If I'm not mistaken, the output
code is written with an assumption that if there's to be
output, there will be at least one line. The -C option seems to
set the "before" and "after" values when they've not been
specifically set. It doesn't seem to be used otherwise. I think
it would take me quite a while to shuffle the print process in
a rational way to accommodate my desire to gain the statistics
of strings in binary files without the mess of binary file data
being output.

I've not attempted to look into this, but perhaps another
mechanism, that might also be useful even for text files, would
be to have a context output length parameter specifying the
maximum number of characters per line of the source to be put
into the output before NL. Zero would a be a tolerable value.
-- 

Walter M. Pawley <address@hidden>
Wump Research & Company
676 River Bend Road, Roseburg, OR 97470
         541-672-8975