Dennis Clarke via Bug reports for GNU grep <bug-grep@gnu.org> writes:
> Perhaps a specific example would be helpful.
My most common case is something like
grep -c --files-with-match 'some fragment of a command' ~/temp/shell.10??
which is searching the log files of my old shell sessions to find the
most recent session that has "many" uses of "some fragment of a
command". Often, because I want to copy-modify-paste that command to
use in a current shell session. Conceptually, the search process is:
find all files that mention the command, sort them by number of uses of
the command, then look at the contents of the one or two files with the
*most* uses (because there often are accidental matches in session logs
that don't "really" use the command). Given that my desired command is
unlikely to output more than 5 or so lines, this patch makes that
process straightforward.
Another case is
grep -c --files-with-match variable_name ~/bash-5.5.17
where I want to first look into the files that most often mention
variable_name to see exactly how it is used.
If these weren't ad-hoc activities, I would construct a careful pipeline
like
grep -c -r pattern directory | sort -t: -k2,2r | head -n3
but for ad-hoc use, it seems to me that it's sensible and convenient to
make the combination -c -l do what it intuitively "ought" to do, given
that that change would be upward-compatible with Posix.
Dale
