Mail Archives: djgpp/1997/03/16/14:01:54
Steven Engelhardt <sengelha AT uiuc DOT edu> wrote:
> grep is either known as General Regular Expression Parser or known as
>the sequence of keys for searching for text in old-school unix ed.
>(something like g/re/p i believe.
I believe that should be Global Regular Expression Print, since that's
what the ed/ex/vi command g/RE/p actually stands for (it also better
describes what the grep command actually does, IMHO).
>> pico (ditto)
> Well pico was based off of pine, the popular mail reader... But other
>than that I don't know where the name came frome.
Given that pico is the metric prefix for "trillionth", I assume it's
meant to indicate that the editor is small.
>Remember, however, that you can either set up an alias or a symbolic
>link to each filename to call it whatever you want, so if you really
>want, you can alias vi to edit. Doing the same thing wasn't possible in
>DOS (without copying the entire file) until the invention of DOSKEY (as
>far as I know).
You could always get the same effect using batch files and there were
also third-party programs that provided aliases long before Microsoft
started including DOSKEY with DOS.
>But if you think about it, the names of the files you work with aren't
>really that important in the end, what's more important is the
>functionality of the utilities you are given. And I will put up the
>functionality of the basic set of unix utilities against the basic set
>of DOS utilities any day.
Definitely, although luckily there are ports/clones of most of the
Unix utilities available for DOS.
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