Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • proper noun A program which selects lines in a file which match a given pattern.
  • verb To use a program such as grep to search in a file.
  • verb By extension, to search anything (perhaps a paper document by eye).

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From an idiomatic command sequence in the qed and ed text editors: ‘g/re/p’, meaning: globally search for a regular expression and print.

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Examples

  • I found a number of programs here on Code Project that emulated grep or called grep from the command line, but while intriguing, were not what I wanted.

    The Code Project Latest Articles Harold Bamford 2010

  • SCHEMA = "prd_schema" # Change this to your schema name grep "ORA -" $LOGFILE > $CURR if! diff $PREV $CURR then

    LXer Linux News 2009

  • The following utilities return 0 upon success. echo touch mv cp mkdir rm hostname grep returns 0 if the pattern is found, 1 if not found, and 2 on error

    Baltiblogs 2009

  • /etc/init. d call grep at least 77 times. awk is called 92 times, cut 23 and sed 74.

    planet.freedesktop.org 2010

  • Track House And Senate Votes On Twitter (September 25th, 2008) alias grep = 'GREP_COLOR = "1; 37; 41" LANG = C grep -- color = auto' var selection; if (window. getSelection) selection = window. getSelection (); else if (document. selection) selection = document. selection.createRange (); document. observe ( "dblclick", function () );

    AlternateIdea - Home 2009

  • - Review and comment on proposed bills before they are even introduced†"or while they are pendingâ€" in Congress. alias grep = 'GREP_COLOR = "1; 37; 41" LANG = C grep -- color = auto' var selection; if (window. getSelection) selection = window. getSelection (); else if (document. selection) selection = document. selection.createRange (); document. observe ( "dblclick", function () );

    AlternateIdea - Home 2008

  • Hippix (Hippo Software; consult file pub/hippo/press. txt, available via anonymous ftp from morgan. cs.utah.edu, for more information) provides a set of low cost Unix-like command utilities (such as grep, awk, sh, and vi) along with a POSIX programming library.

    OS/2 Frequently Asked Questions List by Timothy F. Sipples 1993

  • After that, I changed my approach to the one on line #78: I pipe the address into "grep" and use the content of $DENY_DB as the list of regular expressions to check against that string.

    Linux Gazette 2010

  • However, there's a larger problem here: you don't need to build a state machine to determine whether your messages contain one of the above subjects - you can just use 'grep', or (my preferred method) a hash lookup.

    Linux Gazette 2010

  • Incidentally, note the commented-out line (#77): originally, I used the email address as the "grep" search string and the file as the source, and if the string was found in the file, then that was the end of it.

    Linux Gazette 2010

Comments

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  • means: I know I put the damn keys in here somewhere...

    December 13, 2006

  • Much more useful as a verb than a noun.

    December 13, 2006

  • Spotted the etymology in a youtube video - 8 minute mark.

    G is for Global

    re is for Regular Expression

    P is what their tools tended to end in. https://youtu.be/NTfOnGZUZDk?t=8m1s

    July 7, 2018