
Stewart C. Russell via talk wrote on 2023-04-21 10:45:
I hear that it ships with the latest GNU grep, which removes fgrep and egrep. This could be considered a bad idea: https://mastodon.social/@cks/110232377928840323
I never, ever use fgrep or egrep and I think it's a bad idea. However, the reason being it breaks a lot of scripts, while valid, also raises the issue that scripts ought to use the long form of all options for future readability and maintenance. I've fielded questions on why, i.e., an `rsync` script wasn't performing well. Translating the `rsync -a -b -c -d 1 -e -f -g ...` to long-form options indicated a couple issues with somewhat contradictory options (likely a copy/paste from Stack Overflow) that became immediately apparent. So, `egrep` would be `grep --extended-regexp`, `fgrep` should be `grep --fixed-strings` and `rgrep` should be `grep --recursive` in scripts. `man grep`:
In addition, the variant programs egrep, fgrep and rgrep are the same as grep -E, grep -F, and grep -r, respectively. These variants are deprecated, but are provided for backward compatibility.
My 2ยข rb