What does “grep” stand for? (was: Regular expressions)

[Tim Chase]

On 2015-11-05 05:24, Ben Finney wrote:
> A very common command to issue, then, is “actually show me the line
> of text I just specified”; the ‘p’ (for “print”) command.
> 
> Another very common command is “find the text matching this pattern
> and perform these commands on it”, which is ‘g’ (for “global”). The
> ‘g’ command addresses text matching a regular expression pattern,
> delimited by slashes ‘/’.
> 
> So, for users with feeble human brains incapable of remembering
> perfectly the entire content of the text while it changes and
> therefore not always knowing exactly which lines they wanted to
> operate on without seeing them all the time, a very frequent
> combination command is:
> 
>     g/RE/p

Though since the default action for g/ is to print the line, I've
always wondered why the utility wasn't named just "gre"

   $ ed myfile.txt
   g/re
   [matching lines follow]
   q
   $

-tkc
(the goofball behind https://twitter.com/ed1conf )