Grep is really fast at that at the actual search (gnu grep at least), the gain there is mostly that "smarter" tools will ignore e.g. VCS data or binary files by default whereas grep will trawl through your PNGs and git packfiles.
Excerpt: "The result of this is that, in the limit, GNU grep averages fewer than 3 x86 instructions executed for each input byte it actually looks at (and it skips many bytes entirely)."
> much of Mike Haertel’s advice in this post is still good. The bits about literal scanning, avoiding searching line-by-line, and paying attention to your input handling are on the money.
