grep

English

English Wikipedia has an article on:

grep

Wikipedia

Etymology

From an idiomatic command sequence in the qed and ed text editors: ‘g/re/p’, meaning: globally search for a regular expression and print.

Pronunciation

• (UK) IPA^(key): /ɡɹɛp/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ɛp

Proper noun

grep

1. A program which selects lines in a file which match a given pattern.

Verb

grep (third-person singular simple present greps, present participle grepping, simple past and past participle grepped)

1. (computing) To use a program such as grep to search in a file.

   You can't grep dead trees.

   • 2019, Kamesh Ganesan, Rithin Skaria, Frederik Vos, Hands-On Linux Administration on Azure […] , 2nd edition, Packt Publishing Ltd, →ISBN, page 293:

     Running netstat and grepping for sshd will give a similar output to this: […]

2. (by extension) To search anything (perhaps a paper document by eye).

Derived terms

• greppable

Translations

use the program grep

Dutch: greppen Finnish: grepata German: greppen Japanese: grepする

search anything

Dutch: greppen, zoeken (nl)

Further reading

• Eric S[teven] Raymond, editor (29 December 2003), “grep”, in The Jargon File, version 4.4.7.

Anagrams

• preg