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The history behind "grep"'s name

Hamza Tamenaoul on January 07, 2019

Originally posted in my portfolio. grep, a tool that is widely used in the Unix world, a tool that no one could live without. It's one of the firs...
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Julien Cornuwel

Nice, I didn't know that one :-)
In the same vein, I was taught the story about 'dd' in school : the program makes a 'Carbon Copy' of a file. But 'cc' was already taken by the 'C Compiler'.
Not sure about the authenticity of the story, though.

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Hamza Tamenaoul

It's the same thing I've heard from a "GOTO 2013" talk. Giving the history of unix naming, it's very likely this is what happened.

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Templar++ • Edited

Funny, I always thought it comes from data duplication and I never even checked...

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Michael Tharrington

Haha, as an absolute beginner, I really appreciate this one. I'm taking the Command Line Crash Course in Learn Python The Hard Way and have a bunch of flash cards with different commands on them, grep included.

Anyway, I think I get the "p" part and "re" ... but, what's the deal with "g"?

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Valentin Baca

g matches all lines ("global")

In general, to see all lines matching the regular expression “re”, use g/re/p.

robots.thoughtbot.com/how-grep-got...

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Michael Tharrington

Appreciate ya clearing that up for me. :-)

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Justin

Nice, need to utilize this tool more!

Just wanted to share this link:
Where GREP came from

It's a video of Brian Kernighan, a close colleague of Ken Thompson, explaining how grep came to be; it's pretty interesting because he mentions that Ken created grep overnight!

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Avalander

Wow, I had no idea, thanks for sharing!

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Antonello Galipò

That's an interesting fact, thanks for sharing. I've never asked myself what grep could mean, I should start doing it more often when I use my CLI!

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Ben Halpern

Ha! I never bothered to look this up. I feel like I would have understood its purpose much better as a newbie had I been taught this off the bat. 😄

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Ana Lúcia

Wow, that's useful, sure is easier to remember the command knowing what it means.

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Shi Ling

Ohhhh, so that's how it is. I always thought it was meant to be "grab" but spelt in Ye Old English or something.

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Benjamin Black • Edited

Let's listen to the guy (bwk) who was actually present when it was invented talk about Where GREP Came From.

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Gareth Bradley

As a Windows guy transitioning to Linux, I find this fascinating indeed.

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Nick Janetakis • Edited

If anyone wants to know more about this, there's a great video interview on grep's existence from Brian Kernighan (he contributed towards creating Unix):

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Egidio Caprino

What about the silver searcher?

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Hamza Tamenaoul

I didn't know that one, I'm just discovering it. Thanks for mentioning it. I'll go check it out.