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Issue 4.2

REVIEW

Poirot

Issue: 4.2 (November/December 2005)
Author: Norman Palardy
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 2,887
Starting Page Number: 9
Article Number: 4204
Related Web Link(s):

http://www.espgraphics.com/

Full text of article...

Poirot is, as it's subtitle says, a visual grep tool. If you're not sure what grep is, not to worry: Poirot does and does it well.

The Tutorial is a well done Flash movie that gives a great overview of the tool and how to use it.

The included PDF guide is laid out well. My only complaint is that the pages needed to be rotated

to read the diagrams, and then rotated back to read the accompanying text. The guide is helpful and explains a lot of Poirot's capabilities in very clear and easy to follow terms.

I hadn't even started Poirot yet, and I was already feeling very good about how well this program

would work given the accompanying materials.

On first launching Porit you are advised that grep IS a very powerful search and replace tool and that you should be careful using it.

The metal look is not my favorite, but that's about the biggest fault I can find in Poirot.

I didn't register so I can't comment on the overall speed of multi-file searches, but every other search I did was very fast. Even web searches proceeded very quickly.

Setting up a search is very simple with the interface and, having written a number of regular expressions, was a lot less difficult to get a reasonably complex search set up.

The fact that you can set up a number of searches, and then have them execute in order, is really powerful. Being able to do this with a set of files that you need to find and replace some common elements, like on a web page, would be very useful. I can see how Poirot would be a very handy addition to anyone maintaining a web site.

And, I can see how I could use this. Maybe not day in and day out just yet, but when needed it would be very good.

All in all, Poirot is a very friendly face on grep and indeed very handy and well done.

End of article.