[TUHS] origin of the name 'glob'

[Steve Johnson]

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 at ccc.com>

To:
"Noel Chiappa" <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
Cc:
"TUHS main list" <tuhs at 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 at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
[1]>
 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
[2]

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

         Noel

 

Links:
------
[1] mailto:jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
[2] http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V1/man/man7/glob.7

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