this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
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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.

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[–] captain_aggravated 121 points 4 months 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 4 months ago

I'm telling this story from memory

pun intended? ;D

[–] [email protected] 31 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] captain_aggravated 8 points 4 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago

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

[–] captain_aggravated 6 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months 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 "

[–] captain_aggravated 2 points 4 months 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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months 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.