Where GREP Came From - Computerphile

Computerphile · 1.3M views · 2018-07-06 · 10:07

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Overview

Brian Kernighan explains how grep came to be, written overnight by Ken Thompson, and how it got its name from the ed command g/re/p. He also covers the lineage from QED to ed that led to it.

On Hacker News

HN commenters point to it as a short, charming first-hand account of Unix history from someone who was there.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2018–2020

Topics

History of computing Testing, debugging & developer tools

What people said

peterburkimsher · 2020-11 · Strong recommendation
My favourite BWK video is about grep. [VIDEO] The last part is very quotable: "They had one grave disadvantage, none of them were Ken Thompson"
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peterburkimsher · 2020-11 · Recommendation
Slightly off-topic, but Brian Kernighan has a great video about the origins of grep. If you know anything similar for awk, I'd enjoy watching it! [VIDEO]
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throw0101a · 2020-09 · Reference
"Where GREP Came From" by Brian Kernighan from Computerphile: * [VIDEO] For those unfamiliar, Kernighan is the "K" in K&R C and the "K" in AWK: * [LINK]
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Sources

Video by Computerphile, played through YouTube.

HN Library · Source license

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