Real examples here?

megaman@discuss.tchncs.de to Programming@programming.dev – 1486 points –

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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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.

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.