The Day grep Became a Verb
"Just grep it." If you spend any time around engineers, you'll hear this phrase constantly. Not "search for it" or "look it up." Just "grep it." A Unix command from 1973 has become a verb in everyday engineering conversation.
The name grep comes from g/re/p, a command in the ed text editor meaning "globally search for a regular expression and print matching lines." Ken Thompson, one of Unix's creators, had a search tool he used himself; at a colleague's request, he polished it and released it as a standalone tool. What started as a shortcut became one of the most-used commands in computing history.
So next time someone says "grep it," you'll know exactly what they mean.
