This may also be because the default grep, i.e. BSD grep actually pays attention... | Hacker News

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X-Istence on Nov 28, 2012 | parent | context | favorite | on: GNU grep is 10x faster than Mac grep

This may also be because the default grep, i.e. BSD grep actually pays attention to what you have set in your environment variable LANG. Default on OS X is en_US.UTF-8.

If the author were to set LANG to c. He would find that BSD grep suddenly speeds up tremendously.

pdw on Nov 28, 2012 [–]

GNU grep certainly honors locale settings, and recent versions are fast even when you're using UTF-8 (since release 2.7 or so).

X-Istence on Nov 28, 2012 | [–]

Hmm, interesting. Work is being done on BSD grep to make it faster than it is, so hopefully in the near future the two will be on par.

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