Re: Run-time dynamic linking in grep

[Reuben Thomas]

Thanks for your patience, Jim.

New patch attached, with support for zlib and libbz2, and a test, and
all relevant blurbs (I hope), and a test that passes, along with make
distcheck.

.gz and .bz2 still account for the vast majority of compressed files I
come across. Also, unlike zlib and libbz2, liblzma does not currently
provide a file operations interface that makes it easy to use for
transparent decompression (I am using zlib's and libbz2's veneers for
fdopen, close and read); on the other hand, there's the following
paragraph on the xz home page:

While liblzma has a zlib-like API, liblzma doesn't include any file
I/O functions. A separate I/O library is planned, which would abstract
handling of .gz, .bz2, and .xz files with an easy to use API.

Since I have implemented transparent decompression as a veneer
library, I wonder therefore whether it might not be a good idea to
polish it to be suitable for inclusion in xz, and I thought of
approaching the xz maintainers to ask their opinion; maybe we can kill
two birds with one stone, and get transparent decompression for grep
and the multi-library veneer in liblzma. Advice gratefully received.

I also suggest that both for easier support for many more formats and
to take Paul Eggert's suggestion into account I implement
decompression via a filter, as zutils does. But I thought I'd release
first.

One comment about the documentation: grep.texi has different
sectioning for the flags from grep --help; perhaps this should be
fixed?

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