Having trouble finding a word in multiple files

[Chris Green]

On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 01:16:00PM +0200, Liam Proven wrote:
> On Thu, 18 Jun 2020 at 00:04, Peter Flynn <peter at silmaril.ie> wrote:
> >
> > I think that's what Chris meant. The .doc files are bigger than the text
> > they contain.
> 
> DOC files were bigger, yes. But no, plain text isn't more compact than
> _any_ other form. Text is highly compressible, so any representation
> with internal compression will be smaller.
> 
Well, yes, compressed text is smaller than uncompressed text, but you
have to uncompress it to search it (even if only momentarily).

Much of the advantage of plain text and/or simple markup language is
that you can find things *with context* in them using grep.  The xml
used to store docx files can be searched with grep but you can't see
just the line containing the text you are looking for and/or you can't
ask grep to show you the two or three lines before and after.

-- 
Chris Green