« Perhaps because the grep man page in Unix v4 has the dates 3/3/1973, a lot of articles on the Internet assume this is the creation date of grep

[...]

even after saying that, we were very careful not
to put junk into the utilities directory. grep was
a private command of mine for quite a while
before i made it public.

thats the long answer. the short answer is
“sometime before the 4th edition.”

[...]

One guy McIlroy claimed grep was invented for him. On a lighter note, I suppose. Or not.

    “One afternoon I asked Ken Thompson if he could lift the regular expression recognizer out of the editor and make a one-pass program to do it. He said yes. The next morning I found a note in my mail announcing a program named grep. It worked like a charm. When asked what that funny name meant, Ken said it was obvious. It stood for the editor command that it simulated, g/re/p (global regular expression print).”

[...]

[It has been alleged that the source is from the title of a paper “A General Regular Expression Parser”, but dmr [ NDLR : Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie ] confirms the g/re/p etymology —ESR ]

[...]

Al Aho also a researcher at Bell Labs and the co-author of AWK wrote egrep and fgrep one weekend in 1975.

[...]

If you are on Linux, you are using the GNU grep. Unless of course you have deliberately installed some other grep. On the ESXi console, you have a limited busybox version of grep. On Mac, it’s BSD grep.

[...]

GNU grep was originally written by Mike Haerkal. Version 1 was announced in 1988. However, grep is mentioned in the second issue of GNU’s Bulletin from Jan 1987 “The GNU `ls’, `grep’, `make’ and `ld’ are in regular use”. »

Via : je ne sais plus, cette page est restée trop longtemps parmi mes onglets ouverts :(