What does {some strange unix command name} stand for? awk = "Aho Weinberger and Kernighan" This language was named by its authors, Al Aho, Peter Weinberger and Brian Kernighan. grep = "Global Regular Expression Print" grep comes from the ed command to print all lines matching a certain pattern g/re/p where "re" is a "regular expression". fgrep = "Fixed GREP". fgrep searches for fixed strings only.