this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
1475 points (99.1% liked)

Programming

17020 readers
428 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]



founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Friend who is not a software person sent me this tweet, which amused me as it did them. They asked if "runk" was real, which I assume not.

But what are some good examples of real ones like this? xz became famous for the hack of course, so i then read a bit about how important this compression algorithm is/was.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 119 points 1 month ago (6 children)

I mean, it was either Richard Stallman or Dennis Ritchie that created grep in an evening so that a buddy of his could do research on volumes of text that wouldn't fit in the RAM of a PDP-11 (or similar machine. I'm telling this story from memory). It's designed to do what you would do with the ancient text editor ed using the commands Global, Regular Expression, and Print. g re p. grep. Probably the most important piece of software ever written in a couple hours.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 month ago

I'm telling this story from memory

pun intended? ;D

[–] dellish 32 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Relevant, for those interested in the history of grep. Computerphile

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago

That's actually the video I was retelling from memory.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 month ago

Wikipedia credits it to Ken Thompson, PDP-11 to me implies early Unix.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 month ago (2 children)

It's also, in my opinion, the most verb-able of all *NIX commands.

[–] captainlezbian 11 points 1 month ago

Yeah I’ve told someone to grep something despite knowing they had a windows server

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I don't know, rm being short for "remove" is very verbaceous.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago

Oh go fsck yourself (maybe that works better written...).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Verbaceous is a great word. I'm adding it onto my "favourite words" list ,(even if it isn't technically a word "

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Ah, pshaw, I don't subscribe to the notion that there's such a thing as "not a word." Why bother having a system of root words, prefixes and suffixes if we're not allowed to use that system to build the words we need? Especially for the fun of it. Verbaceous is adjectivacular.

[–] Phrodo_00 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Original grep was pretty much a wrapper around sed (or actually maybe ed, I don't remember). That's why it's called g/re/p, which is the sed command to do the same thing.

[–] ikidd 2 points 1 month ago
[–] mke 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I believe you're thinking of ed, and yes, grep was made out of ed. I remember reading about a university professor who, if memory serves, gave his students the code for ed and told them to turn it into (basically) grep. Said that no one ever managed, despite having more time than the original took in total. That's not to say I think this was fair or cool of the professor, it's just an interesting tale.