this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
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I mean, it was either Richard Stallman or Dennis Ritchie that created grep in an evening so that a buddy of his could do research on volumes of text that wouldn't fit in the RAM of a PDP-11 (or similar machine. I'm telling this story from memory). It's designed to do what you would do with the ancient text editor ed using the commands Global, Regular Expression, and Print. g re p. grep. Probably the most important piece of software ever written in a couple hours.
If he hadn't written it someone else would have. Searching through text is an obvious thing to want to do.
but thank fuck specifically he has cos now it's a brilliant piece of software xD