agrep

agrep

Developer(s)	Udi Manber Sun Wu
Initial release	1988 (1988)
Stable release	3.41.5
Repository	github.com/Wikinaut/agrep
Written in	C
Operating system	Unix-like OS/2 DOS Microsoft Windows
Type	Pattern matching
License	ISC open source license
Website	www.tgries.de/agrep

agrep (approximate grep) is an open-source approximate string matching program, developed by Udi Manber and Sun Wu between 1988 and 1991, for use with the Unix operating system. It was later ported to OS/2, DOS, and Windows.

It selects the best-suited algorithm for the current query from a variety of the known fastest (built-in) string searching algorithms, including Manber and Wu's bitap algorithm based on Levenshtein distances.

agrep is also the search engine in the indexer program GLIMPSE. agrep is under a free ISC License.

Alternative implementations

A more recent agrep is the command-line tool provided with the TRE regular expression library. TRE agrep is more powerful than Wu-Manber agrep since it allows weights and total costs to be assigned separately to individual groups in the pattern. It can also handle Unicode. Unlike Wu-Manber agrep, TRE agrep is licensed under a 2-clause BSD-like license.

FREJ (Fuzzy Regular Expressions for Java) open-source library provides command-line interface which could be used in the way similar to agrep. Unlike agrep or TRE it could be used for constructing complex substitutions for matched text. However its syntax and matching abilities differs significantly from ones of ordinary regular expressions.

See also

• Bitap algorithm
• TRE (computing)

External links

• Wu-Manber agrep
  • AGREP home page
  • For Unix (To compile under OSX 10.8, add -Wno-return-type to the CFLAGs = -O line in the Makefile)
• See also
  • TRE regexp matching package
  • cgrep a defunct command line approximate string matching tool
  • nrgrep a command line approximate string matching tool
  • agrep as implemented in R