A related data point: the grep and egrep supplied with SunOS 4.1.1_U1 (which IIRC is somewhere between 4.2 and 4.3 BSD) both accept -e. However, if -e is specified more than once, they appear to use only the last occurrence. (I had expected that egrep, at least, would report all input lines that match any of multiple -e specifications.)
BTW they are separate executables, neither of which accepts -E.
