Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!pt.cs.cmu.edu!rochester!rit!tropix!moscom!ur-valhalla!uhura.cc.rochester.edu!sunybcs!boulder!ncar!husc6!cmcl2!dasys1!jpr
From: jpr@dasys1.UUCP (Jean-Pierre Radley)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Expansion of the acronym "grep"
Summary: g/regular-expression/p, says K&R
Message-ID: <9968@dasys1.UUCP>
Date: 22 Jul 89 22:01:35 GMT
References: <25249@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <8170003@hpfcdq.HP.COM> <883@nebulus.UUCP> <709@palladium.UUCP> <2555@cveg.uucp>
Reply-To: jpr@dasys1.UUCP (Jean-Pierre Radley)
Organization: TANGENT
Lines: 22

In article <2555@cveg.uucp> jms@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@jpradley.UUCP