awk = "Aho Weinberger and Kernighan"
This language was named by its authors, Al Aho, Peter Weinberger and Brian Kernighan.
cat = "CATenate"
The cat command is a standard Unix program used to concatenate and display files. The name is from catenate, a synonym of concatenate.
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. The "f" does not stand for "fast" - in fact, "fgrep foobar *.c" is usually slower than "egrep foobar *.c"
egrep = "Extended GREP"
nroff = "New ROFF"
troff = "Typesetter new ROFF"
These are descendants of "roff", which was a re-implementation of the Multics "runoff" program (a program that you'd use to "run off" a good copy of a document)
tee = T
From plumbing terminology for a T-shaped pipe splitter.
Perl = "Practical Extraction and Report Language"
Perl = "Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister"
The Perl language is Larry Wall's highly popular freely-available completely portable text, process, and file manipulation tool that bridges the gap between shell and C programming.
