Re: Changing section header autogenerated by 'refer'?

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi,

M Douglas McIlroy wrote on Tue, Nov 17, 2020 at 07:29:14PM -0500:
> Somebody asked:

>> If I'm not mistaken, Research-era AT&T Unix had a look(1)
>> command which was explicitly for quick-and-dirty text
>> database application. I expect a Murray Hill veteran or
>> Plan 9 maven could say more.

> There's not much to say. "Look" did binary search in a file
> of one-line entries. Its main use was to check the presence
> of (prefixes of) words in dictionary lists, particularly
> /usr/dict/words. As machines got faster, "look" lost its speed
> advantage over "grep", which performs much more general search
> and doesn't require ordered data.

FWIW, modern BSD base systems still contain the tool:

  https://man.openbsd.org/look
  http://man.bsd.lv/FreeBSD-12.0/look
  http://man.bsd.lv/NetBSD-8.1/look
  http://man.bsd.lv/DragonFly-5.6.1/look

All the same, like Doug, i guess fewer people actually use it nowadays.

Yours,
  Ingo