this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
1501 points (99.1% liked)
Programming
17416 readers
49 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I mean, it was either Richard Stallman or Dennis Ritchie that created grep in an evening so that a buddy of his could do research on volumes of text that wouldn't fit in the RAM of a PDP-11 (or similar machine. I'm telling this story from memory). It's designed to do what you would do with the ancient text editor ed using the commands Global, Regular Expression, and Print. g re p. grep. Probably the most important piece of software ever written in a couple hours.
pun intended? ;D
Relevant, for those interested in the history of grep. Computerphile
That's actually the video I was retelling from memory.
Wikipedia credits it to Ken Thompson, PDP-11 to me implies early Unix.
It's also, in my opinion, the most verb-able of all *NIX commands.
Yeah I’ve told someone to grep something despite knowing they had a windows server
I don't know, rm being short for "remove" is very verbaceous.
Oh go fsck yourself (maybe that works better written...).
Verbaceous is a great word. I'm adding it onto my "favourite words" list ,(even if it isn't technically a word "
Ah, pshaw, I don't subscribe to the notion that there's such a thing as "not a word." Why bother having a system of root words, prefixes and suffixes if we're not allowed to use that system to build the words we need? Especially for the fun of it. Verbaceous is adjectivacular.
Original grep was pretty much a wrapper around sed (or actually maybe ed, I don't remember). That's why it's called g/re/p, which is the sed command to do the same thing.
TIL
I believe you're thinking of ed, and yes, grep was made out of ed. I remember reading about a university professor who, if memory serves, gave his students the code for ed and told them to turn it into (basically) grep. Said that no one ever managed, despite having more time than the original took in total. That's not to say I think this was fair or cool of the professor, it's just an interesting tale.
If he hadn't written it someone else would have. Searching through text is an obvious thing to want to do.
but thank fuck specifically he has cos now it's a brilliant piece of software xD
And seems easy until you try to implement it yourself from scratch before most of us here were conscious of their workd