If you use grep a lot, you should be using 'ag' (Silver Searcher): http://geoff.greer.fm/ag/
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Or ack (http://beyondgrep.com)
ag was initially written as a faster ack. Maybe ack has caught up since, though.
I doubt, ack is just a perl script while ag is written in C.
If you use grep a lot over a code base, you should index it with "mkid" and use "lid" (gnu id-utils). Quasi-instant results.
Absolutely, more or less grep -> ack -> ag. Be warned tho, sometimes ag (and IIRC ack as well, but haven't used it in a while since switching to ag) won't find some results due to its default filtering rules even tho certain results should be included. For critical things, I end up double-checking results w/ grep -r which always finds everything, no questions asked.