30 Days With Ubuntu Linux: Day 19

Carrying over from yesterday’s examination of the Ubuntu command line, today’s installment of 30 Days With Ubuntu Linux is dedicated to ‘man’ and ‘grep’. These commands wield significant power, and seem to be two of the most commonly used commands for the Ubuntu Linux command line.

I mentioned ‘grep’ in passing yesterday. In the Glossary of Terms at the end of Linux Nitty Gritty: Working at the Ubuntu Command-Line Prompt
, Keir Thomas explains that ‘grep’ is short for “global regular expression print”. That isn’t very helpful, so Thomas goes on to describe it, “In Linux/Unix circles, the word ‘grep’ is synonymous with searching; to ‘grep a file’ is to search through it.”