FreeGrep | Eur Ing Dr James P. Howard II FreeGrep | Eur Ing Dr James P. Howard II

Dr James P. Howard, II
A Mathematician, a Different Kind of Mathematician, and a Statistician

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FreeGrep

FreeGrep was developed primarily over the summer of 1999 as a BSD-licensed alternative to GNU Grep provided with FreeBSD. This edition of grep relies on the local regular express (regex) facilities and provides services for searching compressed archives.

During the summer of 2003, the OpenBSD Project replaced the GNU Grep shipping with OpenBSD with a heavily modified version of FreeGrep. This is the version of grep shipped with OpenBSD 3.4 and later. During the spring of 2004, the NetBSD project replaced GNU Grep with a modified version of OpenBSD’s FreeGrep and ships will NetBSD 2.0 and later. Since then, it has shipped with Haiku, Minix, FreeBSD, and many other operating systems.

As these systems have incorporated FreeGrep, there is unlikely to be substantial new development in the main codebase.

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Image by Andy Mitchell / Wikimedia Commons.