Re: Not a typewriter

[Wayne.Brown@altec.com]

On 05/11/2001 at 12:03:43 PM Joel Jaeggli <joelja@darkwing.uoregon.edu> wrote:

>it's not clear to me that that textsearch is a more  accurate description
>than Get Regular ExPression

It's not more accurate.  But Hacksaw's original point was that a new user would
not know what "not a typewriter" meant.  My point was that a newbie wouldn't be
likely to guess that "grep" means "search for text" either; in both cases he'd
have to look it up if he'd never seen it before.

BTW, grep does not stand for "Get Regular ExPression."  It comes from an
often-used command in the ed (and ex and vi) editor: g/re/p.  The "g" means
"global," the "re" is a regular expression, and the "p" means "print."  So to
search for all lines containing the word "foo" in a file you were editing, you
would type g/foo/p.  This was such a useful function that it was packaged in a
standalone program that could be used to search multiple files.

Wayne