We are stuck with egrep and fgrep (unless you like beating people)
1–10 of 354 posts
Re: We are stuck with egrep and fgrep (unless you like beating people)
#2What problem is this warning trying to solve? Are these two symlinks too much maintenance burden? Or is the check in the code hurting the code quality? Is the extra check at startup ruining performance?
I'm usually in favour of having one way to do things but in this case, with this much legacy it just doesn't seem worth it.
Re: We are stuck with egrep and fgrep (unless you like beating people)
#3Why aren't these split into separate packages? If a distro wants to drop them, they can still be installed. If some distro wants to include them with a warning that's also fair game.
Re: We are stuck with egrep and fgrep (unless you like beating people)
#4alias fgrep='grep -F'
Re: We are stuck with egrep and fgrep (unless you like beating people)
#5> The egrep and fgrep commands have been deprecated since 2007.
Isn't 15 years more than enough time to handle the deprecation?
Re: We are stuck with egrep and fgrep (unless you like beating people)
#6Please put it back.
Re: We are stuck with egrep and fgrep (unless you like beating people)
#7> The egrep and fgrep commands have been deprecated since 2007. Isn't 15 years more than enough time to handle the deprecation?
No. Make install a grep compatibility library if necessary, but don't change output syntax.
Re: We are stuck with egrep and fgrep (unless you like beating people)
#8The blog makes two main points: 1) adding new error messages causes compatibility problems; 2) some people are used to typing "egrep".
On the first point the author only gives hypothetical examples. I feel the argument might have been more compelling if we could see some concrete examples of things that break with GNU Grep 3.8.
As for the second point, I find it less convincing than the first one. If it's just the muscle memory then an alias would be an acceptable workaround. And I doubt that "everyone in the world" would want such an alias, as the author suggests.
Re: We are stuck with egrep and fgrep (unless you like beating people)
#9alias fgrep='grep -F'
the issue is that programs rely on the existence of fgrep in its PATH. your shell alias doesn't fix that.
Re: We are stuck with egrep and fgrep (unless you like beating people)
#10The blog makes two main points: 1) adding new error messages causes compatibility problems; 2) some people are used to typing "egrep". On the first point the author only gives hypothetical examples. I feel the argument might have been more compelling if we could see some concrete examples of things that break with GNU Grep 3.8. As for the second point, I find it less convincing than the first one. If it's just the mu…
It seems pretty simple, piping bash commands into other bash commands and other text stream juggling is a pretty typical use of these commands and so changing what stream is output can change the behavior of consumers of the output of these functions.
I haven’t done anything with fgrep and egrep before but piping grep into another grep for more complex classes of text search is something i use a lot.