From: 71231 DOT 104 AT compuserve DOT com (Richard Slobod)
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject: Re: groff
Date: Mon, 17 Mar 1997 06:52:43 GMT
Organization: Warwick Online
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Message-ID: <332ce616.7914472@news.warwick.net>
References: <Pine DOT LNX DOT 3 DOT 91 DOT 970311105302 DOT 1476D-100000 AT aditya DOT unigoa DOT ernet DOT in> <5gb1hl$g09 AT freenet-news DOT carleton DOT ca> <332944AB DOT 30DC4A0A AT uiuc DOT edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: m255-06.warwick.net
To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
DJ-Gateway: from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp

Steven Engelhardt <sengelha AT uiuc DOT edu> wrote:

>   grep is either known as General Regular Expression Parser or known as
>the sequence of keys for searching for text in old-school unix ed. 
>(something like g/re/p i believe.

I believe that should be Global Regular Expression Print, since that's
what the ed/ex/vi command g/RE/p actually stands for (it also better
describes what the grep command actually does, IMHO).


>> pico       (ditto)
>   Well pico was based off of pine, the popular mail reader... But other
>than that I don't know where the name came frome.

Given that pico is the metric prefix for "trillionth", I assume it's
meant to indicate that the editor is small.


>Remember, however, that you can either set up an alias or a symbolic
>link to each filename to call it whatever you want, so if you really
>want, you can alias vi to edit.  Doing the same thing wasn't possible in
>DOS (without copying the entire file) until the invention of DOSKEY (as
>far as I know). 

You could always get the same effect using batch files and there were
also third-party programs that provided aliases long before Microsoft
started including DOSKEY with DOS.

>But if you think about it, the names of the files you work with aren't
>really that important in the end, what's more important is the
>functionality of the utilities you are given.  And I will put up the
>functionality of the basic set of unix utilities against the basic set
>of DOS utilities any day.

Definitely, although luckily there are ports/clones of most of the
Unix utilities available for DOS.