grep
grep is a command-line utility for searching text for lines that match a regular expression. Its name comes from the ed command
g/*re*/p(g lobal, r egular e xpression, p rint), which has the same effect.12 grep was originally developed for the Unix operating system, and is commonly available on Unix-like and some other systems such as OS-9.3 The shell command that runs the utility has the same name:grep.
Printed 2026-07-07.
(echo:: @ ᯤ)
Footnotes
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Hauben, Michael; Hauben, Ronda (1997). “On the Early History and Impact of Unix Tools to Build the Tools for a New Millennium”. Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet. Los Alamitos, California: IEEE Computer Society Press. ISBN 978-0-8186-7706-9. p. 136: One afternoon I asked Ken Thompson if he could lift the regular expression recognizer out of the editor and make a one-pass program to do it. He said yes. The next morning I found a note in my mail announcing a program named grep. It worked like a charm. When asked what that funny name meant, Ken said it was obvious. It stood for the editor command that it simulated, g/re/p (global regular expression print). ↩
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Raymond, Eric. “grep”. Jargon File. Archived from the original on 2006-06-17. Retrieved 2006-06-29. ↩
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Paul S. Dayan (1992). The OS-9 Guru - 1: The Facts. Galactic Industrial Limited. ISBN 0-9519228-0-7. ↩