Re: What does “grep” stand for?

[Chris Angelico]

On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 6:38 AM, Christian Gollwitzer <auriocus at gmx.de> wrote:
> Am 04.11.15 um 19:24 schrieb Ben Finney:
>>
>> The name is a mnemonic for a compound command in ‘ed’ [0], a text editor
>> that pre-dates extravagant luxuries like “presenting a full screen of
>> text at one time”.
>>
>>  [... lots of fun facts ...]
>
>
> Here is another fun fact: The convincing UI of ed was actually so widely
> applied, that even Microsoft included a similar editor into MSDOS, called
> EDLIN. EDLIN, of course, was a bastardized version of ed that could do much
> less and also lacked regular expressions. Needless to say that the mighty
> "VIsual" editor was out 5 years before MSDOS shipped EDLIN as the only
> editor...
>
> In contrast to ed, the stream editor "sed" is used multiple times avery day
> in a typical Unix session inside shell scripts to perform automated text
> processing tasks, including regex replacement.

As someone who grew up on MS-DOS, I'd like to mention that EDLIN's
value wasn't in the obvious places. There were two features it had
that most other editors didn't: firstly, it would read only as much of
the file as it needed, so you could edit a file larger than available
memory; and secondly, all commands came from stdin, which could be
redirected - making it a poor man's 'sed'. Using EDLIN for regular
file editing was never the normal thing.

Fast forward a decade or two, and I'm working on a MUD server for a
friend. It incorporates an editor that can be used on a dumb telnet
connection - and it's line based again. So there's clearly some value
here :) Visual editors get the lion's share of actual editing work,
but in special circumstances, it is nice to have a quick little
ed-like program around.

ChrisA