Re: question for perl book & magazine authors

While we are talking about grep, does anyone know why grep is called grep? I would have thought filter would be a more appropriate name? Anyone know the "etymology" of the word grep?

-Andrew.

Comment on Re: question for perl book & magazine authors

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Re^2: question for perl book & magazine authors by runrig (Abbot) on Oct 19, 2005 at 21:56 UTC
It comes from the (Unix) grep utility which stands for (g)lobal-(r)egular (e)xpression-(p)rint.	[reply]
Re^2: question for perl book & magazine authors by chester (Hermit) on Oct 19, 2005 at 21:57 UTC
In vim, the command `:g/re/p` (where g means "global", re is clearly "regex" and p means "print") will find all lines matching the regex and print them in a list. This was apparently true of vim's predecessors as well, but it's still a valid (and useful) command in vim today. See also Wikipedia.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^3: question for perl book & magazine authors by Dominus (Parson) on Oct 21, 2005 at 14:54 UTC
Says chester: In vim... The `g/re/p` command actually goes back to `ed`, which was the original Unix editor, back around 1972, and is still provided with all Unix systems. After `ed` came `vi`, the visual editor, with command syntax similar to `ed`'s, and then `vim`, which is an improved version of `vi`. Early versions of Unix also had a `gres` command (perform a substitution on all matching lines) but it was obsoleted by `sed` and abandoned. -- Mark Dominus Perl Paraphernalia	[reply]