[TUHS] Unix gre, forgotten successor to grep (was: forth on early unix)

[Noel Hunt via TUHS]

I will tentatively suggest that it was Andrew Hume. I suspect
his major contribution was the addition of Boyer-Moore.


On Tue, 23 Sept 2025 at 04:38, Thalia Archibald via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org>
wrote:

> Spurred by the discussion on regular expressions in the Forth thread:
>
> Unix V10 included a command named gre, which aimed to succeed grep, egrep,
> and
> fgrep.
>
> Does anyone know anything about it? Who wrote it? Was it used anywhere or
> succeeded by anything? Was it connected to Plan 9 or Inferno?
>
> From its man page:
> > Gre supplants three classic programs, which are still available:
> > Grep handles only ed(1)-like regular expressions. It uses \(\) instead
> of ().
> > Egrep handles the same patterns as gre except for back-referencing with
> \1, \2, ...
> > Fgrep handles no operators except newline (alternation).
>
> https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V10/cmd/gre
> https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V10/man/man1/gre.1
>
> Thanks,
> Thalia Archibald
>