Re: Not a typewriter

Wayne.Brown
2001-05-11T18:39:18Z

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