LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Regular Expression: Tools
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There are a number of applications and languages that support regular expressions, but unfortunately, not all of them support regex in quite the same way. Although regular expressions had their origins in neurophysiology in the 1940s and were developed by theoretical mathematicians in the 1950s and 1960s, the evolution and subsequent divergence of regex implementations was due to the independent development of various Unix tools such as grep, awk, sed, Emacs, and others. [1]
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Actually, you probably already have everything you need to start using regular expressions to get your work done. Regular expressions don't constitute a "language" in the way that C or Perl are languages or a tool in the way that sed or grep are tools; instead, regular expressions constitute a syntax which many languages and tools (including these) support.
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Regular expressions are a powerful tool. We'll look at regular expressions primarily with the unix egrep utility, but keep in mind that regular expressions are used everywhere: they're the backbone of perl programming, for example, and a principal componant of any tool that helps build intereters or compilers.
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Man pages and other forms of documentation abound for the tools which support regular expressions. The regex documentation for Perl is included with the distribution and can be found in "perlre.pod," but there are ... versions of the documentation in Tex, html, pdf, and ascii format (visit CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network for details).
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