Re: question for perl book & magazine authors

[tomazos]

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.

[runrig]

It comes from the (Unix) grep utility which stands for (g)lobal-(r)egular (e)xpression-(p)rint.

[chester]

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.

[Dominus]

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.