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Real examples here? (discuss.tchncs.de)

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@sh.itjust.works 118 points 4 months ago

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.

[-] FiskFisk33@startrek.website 35 points 4 months ago

I'm telling this story from memory

pun intended? ;D

[-] dellish@lemmy.world 31 points 4 months ago

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

[-] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 8 points 4 months ago

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

[-] zaphod@sopuli.xyz 16 points 4 months ago

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

[-] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 15 points 4 months ago

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

[-] captainlezbian@lemmy.world 11 points 4 months ago

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

[-] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 6 points 4 months ago

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

[-] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 9 points 4 months ago

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

[-] AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net 1 points 4 months ago

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

[-] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 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.

[-] Phrodo_00@lemmy.world 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

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@lemmy.world 2 points 4 months ago
[-] mke@lemmy.world 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.

[-] FizzyOrange@programming.dev -5 points 4 months ago

If he hadn't written it someone else would have. Searching through text is an obvious thing to want to do.

[-] nomen_dubium@startrek.website 9 points 4 months ago

but thank fuck specifically he has cos now it's a brilliant piece of software xD

[-] prettybunnys@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 months ago

And seems easy until you try to implement it yourself from scratch before most of us here were conscious of their workd

this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
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