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.
Funny, I always thought it comes from data duplication and I never even checked...
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.
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!
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!
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!
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):