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What is the full form of grep?


Asked by Emilio Rollins on Dec 04, 2021 FAQ



The grep command in Linux is used for searching and matching a text file that contains a particular regular expression. The full form of grep command is "global regular expression print". It is the preinstalled command in every Linux distribution, so you don't need to install it.
Indeed,
The full form of grep command is “global regular expression print”. It is the preinstalled command in every Linux distribution, so you don’t need to install it. In this Article, we will discuss various grep command in Linux.
Subsequently, Before it was named, grep was a private utility written by Ken Thompson to search files for certain patterns. Doug McIlroy, unaware of its existence, asked Thompson to write such a program. Responding that he would think about such a utility overnight, Thompson actually corrected bugs and made improvements for about an hour.
Besides,
Other commands contain the word "grep" to indicate they are search tools, typically ones that rely on regular expression matches. The pgrep utility, for instance, displays the processes whose names match a given regular expression.
Accordingly,
The other great feature about grep and grepl is their adaptation by other packages in R. I am a huge fan and user of the dplyr package by Hadley Wickham because it offer a powerful set of easy-to-use “verbs” and syntax to manipulate data sets.