For those interested in the etymology of these: grep is from the ed command (which itself is short for editor, the original Unix text editor) g/re/p, which Glo

For those interested in the etymology of these: grep is from the ed command (which itself is short for editor, the original Unix text editor) g/re/p, which Globally searches for a Regular Expression and Prints it. sed is Stream EDitor. vi is VIsual editor, which is so named because it's like ed but shows you what you're editing. Not sure where the name awk comes from. All of these tools are closely related to the venerable ed(1) command.