Where GREP Came From - Computerphile

Computerphile1 HN recommender · recommended in 1 month, 2018–2020

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interview · general · evergreen · 2018–2020 on HN

Brian Kernighan explains how grep came to be, written overnight by Ken Thompson, and how it got its name from the ed command g/re/p. He also covers the lineage from QED to ed that led to it.

HN commenters point to it as a short, charming first-hand account of Unix history from someone who was there.

History of computing Testing, debugging & developer tools #grep #unix #kernighan #ed

4 comments from Hacker News

@peterburkimsher2020-11 · in “The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan”

My favourite BWK video is about grep. ▶ this video The last part is very quotable: "They had one grave disadvantage, none of them were Ken Thompson"

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@peterburkimsher2020-11 · in “The State of the Awk”

Slightly off-topic, but Brian Kernighan has a great video about the origins of grep. If you know anything similar for awk, I'd enjoy watching it! ▶ this video

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@throw0101a2020-09 · in “A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)”

"Where GREP Came From" by Brian Kernighan from Computerphile: * ▶ this video For those unfamiliar, Kernighan is the "K" in K&R C and the "K" in AWK: * link

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@jmts2018-07 · in “Where grep came from [video]”

From the video [1]: "The UNIX text editor was called 'eee-dee' - it's not pronounced 'ed', at least by those in the know - it's pronounced 'eee-dee'. This was written by Ken Thompson, and I think it was basically a stripped down version of an editor called QED" [1] ▶ this video

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