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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!feed1.news.erols.com!howland.erols.net!news.mathworks.com!uunet!in1.uu.net!ott.istar!istar.net!tor.istar!east.istar!news.inforamp.net!news From: pitchl@tdbank.ca (Lew Pitcher) Newsgroups: comp.unix.misc,comp.unix.bsd.misc,alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: On the Naming of UNIX Things Date: 12 Nov 1996 02:29:46 GMT Organization: Toronto Dominion Bank Lines: 44 Message-ID: <568neq$7ab@news.inforamp.net> References: <55vhpf$q3o@mail1.wg.waii.com> <328386bc.112278367@news.ov.com> <560d4o$c68@panix2.panix.com> <328631EA.346F@jpmorgan.com> <ralphp-1011961555120001@du-18.gcstation.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: ts14-16.tor.istar.ca X-Newsreader: Forte Free Agent 1.0.82 Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.misc:26292 comp.unix.bsd.misc:1470 alt.folklore.computers:124431 ralphp@gcstation.net (Ralph Wade Phillips) wrote: >Howdy! snip > The "Olympus TuneUp" help file lists GREP as "Global Regular >Expression Parser". > Dunno how accurate, but it both fits the acronmym !AND! describes >what GREP does ... <B-) Not very accurate. According to "The Unix Programmer's Manual - Volume 2" (Bell Labs, 1979) in the article "Advanced Editing on UNIX" by Brian W. Kernighan (Aug. 4 1978), "The program grep was invented to get around these limitations <in multifile editing LP>. The search patterns that we have described in the paper are often called 'regular expressions', and 'grep' stands for g/re/p <UNIX ed command string LP> That describes exactly what grep does -- it prints every line in a set of files that contains a particular regular expression." g/re/p was the mnemonic for the ed command string that located and printed strings: g/UNIX/p would display every occurrance of the string 'UNIX' in the file being edited, while g/fubar/p would do the same for the string 'fubar'. This could be extended from literal matches to regular expression matches a la g/U*X/p or g/f*bar/p. Thus endeth the history lesson. ;-) > (For the $64K question - The Apple Lisa had both a REAL and a >STATED reason for the name. Who knows both?) > RwP >-- >Ralph Wade Phillips, CET #LA-82 >ralphp@gcstation.net Lew Pitcher | "I'm a little source code Toronto Dominion Bank | Short and Stout ======================= | Here is my Input, Enzo Matrix - Reboot | And here is my out"