Re: Most used words in current buffer

[Bob Proulx]

Nick Dokos wrote:
> IIRC, Kernighan & Pike say in the "Unix Programming Environment" that
> there *was* a `head' program, in addition to the `tail' program. It
> fell into disuse and disappeared almost immediately after sed became
> available.

I think you may be thinking of the 'gres' program.  Again here I am
not going to look up the reference but instead just reply upon my
feeble human memory.  But I think you are thinking of the gres
program, global regular expression substitute, which if that route
were followed would require a lot of greX programs where X is replaced
by many specific things and was completely subsumed by 'sed'.

Also remember that at the time knowledge and daily use of ed (and qed,
ex, and the others) made using sed very easy.  Lots of shared
knowledge.  However today that sed may seem arcane to people is just
that they are no longer familiar with ed.  It no longer has that
shared learning that made sed so familiar back in the day.

Bob