On Wed, Aug 11, 2021 at 9:35 AM Paul Eggert <egg...@cs.ucla.edu> wrote: > On 8/11/21 12:22 AM, Simon Josefsson via Bug reports for GNU grep wrote: > > I think the main reason for deprecating > > them was that POSIX dropped a requirement for them? > > As I recall, it was because they were kinda useless cruft. Portable > scripts can't use egrep and fgrep since they're not standardized, and > for personal command-line usage aliases suffice and 'eg' is a better > alias anyway (it's less typing).
IMHO, they must be removed. Anyone who requires to be able to use "egrep" or "fgrep" from the command line can use a function or alias. Given their lack of standardization, those should not be used in scripts. My only questions are "when?" and "how?". I.e. first release intermediate scripts that emit a warning every time they are used, or just drop them from the list of installed targets. I won't do either now, but they've been deprecated for so long I'll definitely consider it for the next release.
