WHY IS GREP

Rumor has it that the grep command comes tous bceause of the search command in the ex editor. The ex editor was the line-based precursor to VI, the legendary Unix editor with the steepest global search, started a regular expression withe the / character, typed your regular expression, terminated it with another /, and then told ex to print the result with a p. In other words, g/re/p. That was so common amongst Unix types htat it became a verb. So, when is came time to write a search utility for the command line, they already had the perfect name: grep.