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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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.
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.
Funny, I always thought it comes from data duplication and I never even checked...
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"?
g matches all lines ("global")
robots.thoughtbot.com/how-grep-got...
Appreciate ya clearing that up for me. :-)
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!
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. 😄
Wow, I had no idea, thanks for sharing!
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!
Let's listen to the guy (bwk) who was actually present when it was invented talk about Where GREP Came From.
Ohhhh, so that's how it is. I always thought it was meant to be "grab" but spelt in Ye Old English or something.
As a Windows guy transitioning to Linux, I find this fascinating indeed.
Wow, that's useful, sure is easier to remember the command knowing what it means.
What about the silver searcher?
I didn't know that one, I'm just discovering it. Thanks for mentioning it. I'll go check it out.
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):