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> What would you name 'grep' instead? Yeah, I found that one an especially weird gripe. Grepping was a new thing, so we needed a word for it. 'Grep' is short,
by __jal 10y ago
> What would you name 'grep' instead?
Yeah, I found that one an especially weird gripe. Grepping was a new thing, so we needed a word for it. 'Grep' is short, easy to say and type, and relatively hard to confuse with similar words in the domain. Works for me.
I can unfortunately imagine a modern startup implementing it, and shudder at potential names my imagination is coming up with... Searchlr, the best way to search text! ReadMonkey, your personal pattern recognizer! I'll stop now.
- richardwhiuk 10y agosearch?
- __jal 10y agoSo how do you know what type of search you're doing? There were existing text matching algorithms at the time. "No, I mean the kind of car that is really big, that you drive on ice rinks to smooth out the ice."
- flukus 10y agoSearch what? File names? File contents? Users? Machines?
- TeMPOraL 10y agoYou could say the same about "mv". Move what? Files? File names? File parts? Users? Machines? Screens? There's always some default subject implied for every command name. For "find" it is files, for "search" it could have been text.
- flukus 10y ago> You could say the same about "mv". Move what? Files? File names? File parts? Users? Machines? Screens? Files, the base type that's consistent across all the basic commands (AFAIK).
- int_19h 10y agoIt depends on what you mean by "basic command". There are plenty which take arguments that aren't files - chown, chgrp and su, for example.
- xorcist 10y agoCouldn't they just have called it google??