Expansion of the acronym "grep"

Gregory Kemnitz kemnitz at mitisft.Convergent.COM
Wed Jun 7 03:17:33 AEST 1989



I read in a UNIX book (I forgot which one) at some time that "grep"
stands for the commands from the ed(1) editor that can be used to approximate
it:

g/re/p

which is read as get /regular_expression/ print.

egrep is extended grep with more general regular expressions than those in
ed(1)
fgrep is fast grep with literal strings only.

-- 
----------------------------------+--------------------------------------
Greg Kemnitz                      |  "He who does not understand baseball
kemnitz at Convergent.COM            |   will never understand America"
                                  |  --Tocqueville



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