Survey of Global Regular Expression Print (grep) Tools

The UNIX grep utility marked the birth of a global regular expression print (GREP) tools. Searching for patterns in text is important operation in a number of domains, including program comprehension and software maintenance, structured text databases, indexing file systems, and searching natural language texts. Such a wide range of uses inspired the development of variations of the original UNIX grep. This variations range from adding new features, to employing faster algorithms, to changing the behaviour of pattern matching and printing. This survey presents all the major developments in global regular expression print tools, namely the UNIX grep family, the GNU grep family, agrep, cgrep, sgrep, nrgrep, and Perl regular expressions.