"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
>