Virtually everyone in our profession knows about grep and how to use it. But do you know where the name came from? If you’re old enough to remember the pre-Linux days you probably do. If you’ve never worked on a Unix (as opposed to Linux) system you may never have heard the story and even if you did, you probably didn’t have the context to understand the answer.
The excellent <computerphile> series has a great short video in which Brian Kernighan explains the genesis of the grep name. When you watch the video, you’ll see what I mean about “context.” To really understand the name you have to have at least a passing familiarity with the ed editor.
In a way, the most interesting aspect of the video—at least for the greybeard contingent—is the comments. I would have thought, before reading them, that virtually everyone in our field knew, at least generally, where the name came from. That is decidedly not the case. Many of the commenters expressed delighted surprise to find out the answer. One even admitted that he’d always assumed the ‘g’ stood for GNU. That’s not an unreasonable assumption if you grew up with Linux but grep comes from the early 1970’s (it first appeared in Version 6) so it was born and named long before the GNU project was conceived.
Everyone will enjoy the video—it’s only 10 minutes—but if you’re a younger developer and don’t know this stuff, it’s especially important to watch it. This is part of our heritage and it’s important that you help keep the knowledge of it alive.