Re: Searching the IFS using Windows7

If you're going to use grep, anyway, wouldn't it make a lot more sense to run it under IBM i rather than Windows?

With any Windows-based tool, in order to do the searching, the file has to be downloaded (over the network) from the IFS to your PC. Granted, on a high-speed LAN using Windows Networking or NFS this is pretty fast, but nowhere near as fast as direct disk access would be.

So... if you're going to use grep, and are happy with it, why not use the grep tool that comes with the operating system? Then it can do local disk access and run very fast.

I'd only incorporate Windows into the mix if it's needed to give you a better user interface -- one that will boost your productivity enough to make up for the speed decrease.


On 7/23/2012 4:42 PM, John Yeung wrote:

There are quite a number of good grep tools for Windows, including
several that are free. Check out the various answers to the following
Stack Overflow questions:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/87350/what-are-good-grep-tool-for-windows
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1416241/is-there-a-pattern-matching-utility-like-grep-in-windows

Presumably, if your IFS is reachable from Windows, one or more of
those tools should work. (I don't have personal experience with this,
I only FTP files back and forth.)

But I'm actually a bit surprised you weren't able to get the same or
better results from Win 7's built-in search that you got from Win
XP's.

John