Grep 3.7 Released To Fix "Extreme Performance Degradation"

If you have noticed grep regressing performance-wise in recent releases, you may want to upgrade to GNU Grep 3.7 released this weekend as it fixes a nasty performance regression.

GNU Grep is widely-used by programmers, system administrators, and others for searching textual data from the command-line. Grep 3.7's release is primarily driven by a fix for "extreme performance degradation" plaguing recent Grep releases.

This fixes a bug in grep where pre-processing N patterns could take at least O(N^2) time when too many patterns hashed too few buckets. Some commands could take days rather than seconds. Or even some grep searches that normally would complete in under one second were now taking many seconds.

The fix was in place since the end of last year following the Grep 3.6 release albeit didn't see a new stable release until this weekend.

Downloads and more details on Grep 3.7 via GNU.org with this bug fix leading the new release.