*BSD News Article 95696


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From: jon@jgcomp.jvnc.net (Jon LaBadie)
Subject: Re: unix acronyms -collecting a list?
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Date: Sun, 18 May 1997 05:31:10 GMT
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References: <5kd2ng$c8b$1@rzsun02.rrz.uni-hamburg.de> <337A003F.6A7B@ncofsi.com> <3378D37F.462F3A47@gaijin.com> <x6iv0l7uxw.fsf@ez.bts.com> <5ldtv3$jnm@eve.speakeasy.org> <337B0F6C.4C71614A@indiana.edu> <01bc622b$b51fb0c0$f8298acd@sgifford.tir.com>
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In article <01bc622b$b51fb0c0$f8298acd@sgifford.tir.com>, "Scott W. Gifford" <sgifford@tir.com> writes:
|> 
|>   The story that I have heard about grep is that the name comes from a
|> common usage of Sed...In pre-grep days, the same thing was (and still can
|> be) accomplished with:
|> 
|> 	sed -e g/regular expression/p
|> 
|> As this usage became more common, documentation, newsgroups messages, etc.
|> began to abbreviate "regular expression" to "re", leading to people talking
|> about:
|> 
|> 	sed -e g/re/p
|> 
|> And that, as they say is history.  I don't remember where this story came
|> from, and there's a fair-to-middling chance it has no basis in fact, but I
|> choose to believe it.


I find this repeated misinformation about sed and grep amazing.
Particularly as sed has NO GLOBAL COMMAND!!!

    $ sed -e 'g/x/p' /etc/termcap
    sed: command garbled: g/x/p

sed has a "g" command to "get" the hold space.
sed has a "g" flag to the "s" command.

Drop the "s" from "sed" guys and you got it.

jl
-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon@jgcomp.com
 JG Computing                   jon@jgcomp.jvnc.net
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