Where GREP Came From - Computerphile

Commonly used grep was written overnight, but why and how did it get its name? Professor Brian Kernighan explains.

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This video was filmed and edited by Sean Riley.

[torlilstudios]

Students: this project is impossible
Professor Kernighan: KEN THOMPSON built this GREP in A CAVE with a BOX OF SCRAPS

[Goodvvine]

At an interview -
recruiter: what would you consider your greatest weakness?
me: I'm not Ken Thompson

[davidgillies]

Not being Ken Thompson is a struggle every working software engineer has to contend with.

[dgollas]

It's great to watch and hear legendary computer scientists talk about such fundamental and ubiquitous tools.

[bjornmu]

grep is not only a program, it has become a verb. It is common among computer people to talk about grepping for something. Which may or may not actually be done with grep.

[crcrewso]

“And of course they all had one disadvantage, None of them were Ken Thompson”

Oh My!!!! Best line of the series.

[piotrarturklos]

This video is such a gem! Computerphile is making a great contribution to the history of computer science.

[denravonska]

In Swedish the word "grep" means "pitchfork" which I've always though fit beautifully. You have a stream of stuff coming in and you jam your pitchfork in to grab what you're interested in.

[boolmax]

I've been watching videos from this channel for a pretty long time and I just now realized that this guy is THE Brian Kernighan.

[imranariffin]

"I was teaching at Princeton as a visitor, and I needed an assignment for my programming class. And I thought "Hmm!". So what I did was to tell them - the students in the class: "OK, here is the source code for 'ed'. It was at the time probably 1800 lines of C. "Your job is to take these 1800 lines of C and convert them into 'grep' as a C program. OK, and you've got a week to do it". And I told them at that point, that they had a couple of advantages. First, they what the target was. Somebody had already done 'grep' so they knew what it was supposed to look like. And all they had to do was replicate that behaviour. And the other thing is that it was now written in C. The original 'grep' was written in PDP 11 assembly language. And of course, they also had one grave disadvantage: None of them were Ken Thompson."
8:58 - 9:45

Hahaha savage

[rhymereason]

Thank you Mr. Kernighan and all your contemplates like Bill Joy, Dennis Richie, Ken Thompson, and others for giving us the greatest computing environment imaginable. Amazing how after 50 years it's still so relevant because of your genius.

[BrunoRegno]

The awe with which you, Mr. Brian Kernighan, speak of Mr. Ken Thompson... It just drives home the fact that we all just stand on the shoulders of giants. You might have received astronomical amounts of these, but here is one more: THANK YOU.

[vegidio]

This guy is one of the living legends of computer science! I still have his book at home <3

[aner_bda]

From my beginning of learning Linux and Unix, I've known that grep stood for global regex print, but never heard the full story, and it's relation to ed. Really great video!

[xkguy]

I learned Fortran in the mid 60s. It required punch cards and a single error would reject your whole batch.
I knew then computers would never be very important.

[sebsplatter]

This just blew my mind. I just started out trying to wrap my head around vim as an editor and this video has already helped contextualize so many of its commands and shortcuts. Apparently if you come out of the UNIX-World (I dont!) many many of these supposedly hard to memorize command-structures already existed in the form of ed and grep and you are literally using unix tools... goddamnit I need to learn more about unix now, this is just brilliant!

[GaryL]

OMG, I remember being a AT&T technician that visited Bell Labs in Holmdel, NJ (I think) in about 1974 or so. We were a new hardware maintenance group for DEC PDP-11s and were given a demo of Unix including a demo of GREP. We were blown away with how GREP piped to other utilities like WC could do really useful analytics. Was still using it when I retired as an Oracle DBA in 2020 when the pandemic hit. Still occasionally play with it on Ubuntu.

The original Unix filesystem was such a wonderfully elegant piece of software that was the foundation so much else.

[aztlan-dev]

Always awesome to hear Brian Kernighan speak, thanks for doing the interview!

[mikeklaene]

grep - simple magic. In 2007 at the age of 60 I was applying for a job in IT at SEPTA - the transit agency for the Philadelphia area. At the time they were using networked SCO Unix systems for the commuter rail dispatching system. The first question asked during my employment interview was: What is 'grep' and how can you use it?
Having had been introduced to UNIX in the mid-1980s - it was a rather easy question.

[skaruts]

You don't see this quality content on TV.