Doug would probably be a better source, but, as you know, grep stands for global regular expression print. This is a literal translation into words of a common idiom in vi (and ed before that): g/xxx/p which prints all the lines that match xxx. The g means that it finds all lines, rather than just searching for one.

Since glob tends to match more than one thing, but not in the usual way, I suspect that it is a shortening of "global regular expression print" (with no print, and not, strictly speaking, the usual regular expression syntax either)...

As to why regular expressions are called "regular" expressions, that happened long before Unix...

Steve

----- Original Message -----
From:
"Clem Cole" <clemc@ccc.com>

To:
"Noel Chiappa" <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
Cc:
"TUHS main list" <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
Sent:
Fri, 7 Jul 2017 13:37:21 -0400
Subject:
Re: [TUHS] origin of the name 'glob'

This is matches my memory/was the way I learned it - ie glob was just short for "global" (expression).

Steve / Doug any memories?

On Fri, Jul 7, 2017 at 12:55 PM, Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
> From: Ron Minnich

> Why was it called glob? I always wondered.

Something about global expressions.

I recall reading about this somewhere; I tried looking in the man page:

http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V1/man/man7/glob.7

but it didn't go into any detail. I don't know where I could have seen it,
alas...

Noel