29 Oct
2019
29 Oct
'19
9:13 p.m.
Thanks to Jon's super response on the first story, we know it originally
occurred at Ford Aerospace.
Let me tell the other story. Perhaps someone will know some details.
When I tell it, usually to nontechnical people, I prefix it by
explaining that UNIX has 3 different grep programs, all of which find
text in files. There is regular grep. There is fgrep, the "fixed grep",
which is simpler and only looks for basic text. And there is egrep, the
"enhanced grep", that will look for fancy patterns and is very powerful.
You would expect that fgrep, being the simplest, would be the fastest,
but as it turns out, egrep is the fastest and fgrep is the slowest.
One day at a meeting at Bell Labs, an MTS came rushing into the meeting,
all out of breath. "Sorry I'm late, I was grepping my apartment for my
keys."
Dryly, the boss replied "You should have used egrep. It's faster."