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From: "John P. Linderman" <jpl.jpl@gmail.com>
To: Doug McIlroy <doug@cs.dartmouth.edu>
Cc: The Unix Heritage Society <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 32, Issue 12
Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2018 09:47:44 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAC0cEp-XYOWdq_+dxTfbbeqYX-6CHnUpsxAjHF=Fd-jcNynAyA@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <201807181139.w6IBdvUT063499@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU>

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"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@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
>

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  reply	other threads:[~2018-07-18 13:48 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 8+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
     [not found] <mailman.3.1531879201.24006.tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
2018-07-18 11:39 ` Doug McIlroy
2018-07-18 13:47   ` John P. Linderman [this message]
2018-07-18 16:13     ` [TUHS] grep William Cheswick
2018-07-18 16:25       ` Kurt H Maier
2018-07-18 17:13         ` George Michaelson
2018-07-18 17:35           ` Bakul Shah
2018-07-19  2:50     ` [TUHS] Grep (was: TUHS Digest, Vol 32, Issue 12) Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2018-07-18 14:41   ` [TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 32, Issue 12 arnold

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