After checking out a page called Perl one-liners and reading how you could execute Perl inline on the CLI, I decided to try and replicate some grep functionality using PHP one-liners for fun.
Interestingly, PHP seems quite slow compared to other tools for my particular task, so I probably won’t be using these approaches outlined below in daily practice. :-)
Here are some stats for a search through all files in the current directory for words with ‘foo’ in them:
time to search using PHP:
username@host:~$ time php -r '$s="foo";$fs=scandir(".");foreach($fs as $f){$ls=file($f);foreach($ls as $l){if(strpos($l,$s)!==false)echo "$f:$l";}}' filename.txt:football season is approaching real 0m0.013s user 0m0.012s sys 0m0.000s
time to search using Perl:
username@host:~$ time perl -ne 'print "$ARGV:$_" if /foo/' * filename.txt:football season is approaching real 0m0.003s user 0m0.000s sys 0m0.000s
time to search using grep:
username@host:~$ time grep -H foo * filename.txt:football season is approaching real 0m0.002s user 0m0.000s sys 0m0.000s
As you can see, to use the one liner technique it appears to be as simple as “compressing” your scripts down to a single line, making sure they are shell friendly, and executing them with the “-r” option. Some other ones that I worked out with PHP are below:
to search for ‘foo’ and print matching lines in a single file
php -r '$s="foo";$ls=file("filename");foreach($ls as $l){if(strpos($l,$s)!==false)echo$l;}'
to search for ‘foo’ and print matching lines in all files in the current directory
php -r '$s="foo";$fs=scandir(".");foreach($fs as $f){$ls=file($f);foreach($ls as $l){if(strpos($l,$s)!==false)echo$l;}}'
to search for ‘foo’ and print matching lines recursively from the current directory
php -r '$s="foo";$t=new RecursiveDirectoryIterator(".");foreach(new RecursiveIteratorIterator($t) as $f){$ls=file($f);foreach($ls as $l){if(strpos($l,$s)!==false)echo$l;}}'
feature complete
