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

[Don Caldwell via TUHS]

It was definitely Andrew Hume. While at Shannon Labs, he was promoting and
using it for some of his projects.

On Tue, Sep 23, 2025 at 12:59 AM Noel Hunt via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> 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
> >
>