> If I'm not mistaken, Research-era AT&T Unix had a look(1) command which was explicitly for quick-and-dirty text database application. I expect a Murray Hill veteran or Plan 9 maven could say more.
There's not much to say. "Look" did binary search in a file of one-line entries. Its main use was to check the presence of (prefixes of) words in dictionary lists, particularly /usr/dict/words. As machines got faster, "look" lost its speed advantage over "grep", which performs much more general search and doesn't require ordered data. Doug
