Expansion of the acronym "grep"

[Jean-Pierre Radley]

In article <2555 at cveg.uucp> jms at hcx.uucp (Michael Stanley) writes:
>
>I heard a long time ago that the origin of the word grep was the following
>old 'ed' command:
>
>'re' stood for a regular expression, and 'p' meant print.  Basically,
>this command accomplished the same thing (in the editor) that grep
>accomplishes at the shell level.  If anyone can confirm this, I'd
>definitely be interested to hear if it is correct.  I believe I read
>this in an old UNIX manual.
>

You can confirm this on page 18 of the
first edition of Kernighan & Pike,
"The UNIX Programming Environment"

They say explicitly that grep was named from
g/regular-expression/p

Q.E.D.
-- 
Jean-Pierre Radley		CIS: 72160,1341		jpr at jpradley.UUCP