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[–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

At least part of this is the decentralized/complied nature of a FOSS operating system. You don't get a command called grep because someone making design decisions about a complete system holistically decides that tool should be called grep. You get it because some random programmer in the world needed a way to find patterns in text so they wrote one and that guy called it grep and someone else saw utility in packaging that tool with an OS. It's a patchwork, and things like this are a culture of sorts.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago*

    interesting you used grep because it's a command that has a very clear origin.

    in ed/vi the g command was used to run commands on some pattern. eg g/[regex pattern]/[command]

    the p command was used to print current line so to print any line that matched the string "grep" you would do: g/grep/p.

    when this was made into a seperate command it was called grep: g/re/p. using re to denote regex.

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