greenbar n.
A style of fanfolded continuous-feed paper with alternating
green and white bars on it, especially used in old-style line
printers. This slang almost certainly dates way back to mainframe
days.
Node:grep, Next:gribble, Previous:greenbar, Up:=
G =
grep /grep/ vi.
[from the qed/ed editor idiom g/_re_/p, where _re_
stands for a regular expression, to Globally search for the
Regular Expression and Print the lines containing matches to it,
via Unix grep(1)] To
rapidly scan a file or set of files looking for a particular
string or pattern (when browsing through a large set of files,
one may speak of `grepping around'). By extension, to look for
something by pattern. "Grep the bulletin board for the system
backup schedule, would you?" See also vgrep.
[It has also been alleged that the source is from the title of
a paper "A General Regular Expression Parser" -ESR]