#R:pegasus:-164100:uicsl:11300001:000:259 uicsl!sarwate Aug 27 11:44:00 1984 grep stands for g/re/p which is an ed command to print all lines matching the thing within the /'s. re means regular expression in this context. Reference: B. W. Kernighan, "Advanced Editing on UNIX", p. 15, in UNIX Programmer's Manual, vol. 2A, Jan. 1979.