Rome was not built in a day, but grep was (sort of) 😎 The origin story behind the creation of grep utility is fascinating. The co-creator of the UNIX operating system, Ken Thompson, developed grep 'overnight'. Actually, he had a personal tool for searching for text in files. His department head Doug McIlroy came to him and said, "You know it would be really great if we could look for things in files". "I'll think about it overnight", said Thompson. He went back home and modified the code in his tool to fix bugs. Took him an hour at most. The next day, he presented it to McIlroy and he exclaimed, "This is exactly what I wanted" And the rest is history. If you are wondering why the utility is called grep and not search, there is perfectly good logic behind it 👇