Expansion of the acronym "grep"

[Peter Johnson ~]

In article <25249 at agate.BERKELEY.EDU>, glass at mica writes:
>What is the correct expansion of the acronym "grep"? I'm told that this
>has come up in comp.unix.questions before, but the relevant articles are
>no longer on my news server. I'd also be interested in knowing what the
>acronyms for the other flavors of grep (e.g. egrp) expand to.
>
>--Brett

"grep" stands for "global regular expression print".  It got it's name
from the documentation for ed, which gave the syntax for the print
command as "g/re/p", where g is the line specifier, re is the regular
expression (in slashes) and p is the print command.

"fgrep" gets its name from "fast grep", and it only supports searching
for strings (so the re in its name is a misnomer.)

"egrep" means extended grep because it supports extended regular
expressions. (ie. | and grouping, but not tagging)

-Pete

Peter Johnson

pete at escher.intel.COM
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