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(Changes to grep) Time To Stop Using egrep and fgrep Commands, Per GNU grep 3.8

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Re: (Changes to grep) Time To Stop Using egrep and fgrep Commands, Per GNU grep 3.8

#5

I feel like this is a pretty silly thing to deprecate. What is the harm in keeping around egrep and fgrep?

On their own it's probably trivial. I suspect over time it becomes a large tasks/maintenance question.

Depending on the number of additional commands on similar removal paths it may have performance/memory improvement implications for minimum supported specs.

Re: (Changes to grep) Time To Stop Using egrep and fgrep Commands, Per GNU grep 3.8

#6
post #5

I feel like this is a pretty silly thing to deprecate. What is the harm in keeping around egrep and fgrep?

On their own it's probably trivial. I suspect over time it becomes a large tasks/maintenance question. Depending on the number of additional commands on similar removal paths it may have performance/memory improvement implications for minimum supported specs.

Does it though? I mean we’re really talking about a teeny tiny little startup code to read arg0 and use it to do the equivalent of passing -E or -P.

Re: (Changes to grep) Time To Stop Using egrep and fgrep Commands, Per GNU grep 3.8

#10
post #5

I feel like this is a pretty silly thing to deprecate. What is the harm in keeping around egrep and fgrep?

On their own it's probably trivial. I suspect over time it becomes a large tasks/maintenance question. Depending on the number of additional commands on similar removal paths it may have performance/memory improvement implications for minimum supported specs.

I don't think that's why, on my Arch Linux box they're just shell scripts that pass the -E/-F argument to regular Grep.

  $ cat /usr/bin/egrep
  #!/bin/sh
  exec grep -E "$@"

  $ cat /usr/bin/fgrep
  #!/bin/sh
  exec grep -F "$@"
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