Geeky Fun: The Origins of GREP
This is pretty much taken verbatim from my LPI Linux Certification in a Nutshell book:
The word grep is actually an acronym. The line editor ed contained (contains?) a command to display the lines of a file being edited that matched a pattern. The command was:
g/regular expression/p
In essence this mean ‘global regular expression print’. The concept became so useful that a separate grep utility was written to perform this magic on any text file.
There. Now you know.
