Re: What does “grep” stand for?

[Christian Gollwitzer]

Am 05.11.15 um 01:42 schrieb Chris Angelico:
> On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 6:38 AM, Christian Gollwitzer <auriocus at gmx.de> wrote:
> 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.

I also grew up with MSDOS, albeit some later version (3.0 was the first, 
I think I remember). I knew that EDLIN existed, but never ever have used 
it. On my first "own" (actually my father's) machine, the Amstrad 
PC1512, there was a preinstalled GUI working environment called GEM from 
Digital Research. The DOS commandline was used for configuring and 
booting the system, but never for editing files. I had used copy con: to 
create a file. If I'm not mistaken, DR shipped some "visual" editor for 
DOS with it as an addition.

The point I'm so amused is, that MS has not felt the need to ship a real 
editor, and also cut back on most of the other tools that make 
computing, even on commandlines, a pleasant experience. Readline? 
Tab-Completion? I read a magazine called "DOS", where they scripted the 
hell out of .BAT-files. When they first showed an article about bash 
programming, I was really jealous that the people on these strange, 
exotic OSes had such a complete programming language at their disposal. 
Now I can't imagine giving it back ever.

>
> 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.

In this case I'd copy the file to the local machine and sync it using 
rsync or git. It's almost as terse in terms of bandwidth as the manual 
editing commands, but a lot more comfortable.

	Christian