18 Jul
2018
18 Jul
'18
5:39 p.m.
Arnold was clerly on the Unix Room wavelength. ^All those two-letter
commands were spelled out in conversation, even m-v. The pronunciation
of rmdir was hybrid: r-m-dir. But when one talked about an action--not
a command per se--verbs would be used: move or copy a file, list
a directory. The famous exception is grep, which became a verb. There
was no snappy ready-made verb that covered all the aspects of its use:
search for mentions in one file, find files that mention, look for
patterns, filter data, check for malformed data, ... The verb had
two idiomatic variants, "grep for" and "grep out".
Doug
18 Jul
18 Jul
7:47 p.m.
New subject: TUHS Digest, Vol 32, Issue 12
"Grep" as a verb expanded beyond files. I recall a friend saying they were
"grepping for their keys on the dresser".
On Wed, Jul 18, 2018 at 7:39 AM, Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
Arnold was clerly on the Unix Room wavelength. ^All
those two-letter
commands were spelled out in conversation, even m-v. The pronunciation
of rmdir was hybrid: r-m-dir. But when one talked about an action--not
a command per se--verbs would be used: move or copy a file, list
a directory. The famous exception is grep, which became a verb. There
was no snappy ready-made verb that covered all the aspects of its use:
search for mentions in one file, find files that mention, look for
patterns, filter data, check for malformed data, ... The verb had
two idiomatic variants, "grep for" and "grep out".
Doug
10:13 p.m.
New subject: grep
Marion Harris gave a talk at 1985 Portland (Fireworks and Salmon) Usenix about the
unapologetic use of such verbs.
Grep uses the “gr” as in grasp, grope, grab, etc, similar to the “sl” in slither, slider,
sleek, etc. She gave a linguistic term for such things, and I remember a word like
“sythesim”, but that’s not it.
ches
10:25 p.m.
New subject: grep
On Wed, Jul 18, 2018 at 12:13:08PM -0400, William Cheswick wrote:
Marion Harris gave a talk at 1985 Portland (Fireworks
and Salmon)
Usenix about the unapologetic use of such verbs.
Grep uses the “gr” as in grasp, grope, grab, etc, similar to the
“sl” in slither, slider, sleek, etc. She gave a linguistic term
for such things, and I remember a word like “sythesim”, but that’s
not it.
ches
I think it's probably "phonestheme" as defined by Firth in "The
Tongues of Men & Speech."
khm
11:13 p.m.
New subject: grep
I was always told g/re/p as in g(lobally) apply r(egular) e(xpression)
and p(rint) was a backronym which reflected the regex commonalities of
sed/awk/grep/ed/ex/vi (ok, the latter two of course eggregiously
offend because its Bill Joy exoticism, but I think by now we can
accept some of the pauline epistles have later authors and are still
held to be useful...
I like the linguistic moment here. AWKward language? No. Not at all.
sqwawk came to mind. and roff, as a simpler runoff, also seems to find
how people take english and mogrify it to make new things.
-G
On Wed, Jul 18, 2018 at 12:25 PM, Kurt H Maier <khm(a)sciops.net> wrote:
On Wed, Jul 18, 2018 at 12:13:08PM -0400, William
Cheswick wrote:
Marion Harris gave a talk at 1985 Portland
(Fireworks and Salmon)
Usenix about the unapologetic use of such verbs.
Grep uses the “gr” as in grasp, grope, grab, etc, similar to the
“sl” in slither, slider, sleek, etc. She gave a linguistic term
for such things, and I remember a word like “sythesim”, but that’s
not it.
ches
I think it's probably "phonestheme" as defined by Firth in "The
Tongues of Men & Speech."
khm
11:35 p.m.
New subject: grep
On Wed, 18 Jul 2018 13:13:52 -0400 George Michaelson <ggm(a)algebras.org> wrote:
George Michaelson writes:
I was always told g/re/p as in g(lobally) apply
r(egular) e(xpression)
and p(rint) was a backronym which reflected the regex commonalities of
sed/awk/grep/ed/ex/vi (ok, the latter two of course eggregiously
offend because its Bill Joy exoticism, but I think by now we can
accept some of the pauline epistles have later authors and are still
held to be useful...
Here Brian Kernighan tells the story of how grep came about.
I love how he ends the story!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTfOnGZUZDk
19 Jul
19 Jul
8:50 a.m.
New subject: Grep (was: TUHS Digest, Vol 32, Issue 12)
On Wednesday, 18 July 2018 at 9:47:44 -0400, John P. Linderman wrote:
"Grep" as a verb expanded beyond files. I
recall a friend saying they were
"grepping for their keys on the dresser".
It's interesting to note that the Oxford English Dictionary has
included grep`both as a noun and as a verb in 2003. From the noun:
Etymology: < grep, a string of characters used as a command in the
Unix operating system < the initial letters of global(ly)
search regular expression print.
The string g/re/p (where re stands for the regular
expression searched for) was earlier used in a Unix text
editor as the syntax for a sequence of commands
performing the same operation as grep.
Here your usage:
2. trans. slang (usually humorous). Of a person: to search; to scan visually.
1984 The Doctor's New Clothes in net.tv.drwho (Usenet newsgroup) 16
Aug. Peter Davison happened across his clothes while grepping
the TARDIS for the Zero Room.
Greg
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7 comments
8 participants
participants (8)
-
arnold＠skeeve.com -
Bakul Shah -
Doug McIlroy -
George Michaelson -
Greg 'groggy' Lehey -
John P. Linderman -
Kurt H Maier -
William Cheswick