I totally agree here with Karl, obsoleting fgrep and egrep is the wrong way to go. It's built into too many scripts world-wide, as well as burned into the "finger ROMs" of too many users. Not to mention all the books / training materials that talk about them that people may have.
Thanks, Arnold Karl Berry <k...@freefriends.org> wrote: > Actually, egrep and fgrep were not entirely portable > > They were portable to every system I ever used (admittedly not the > entire world), before POSIX got involved. > > These days, my impression is that it's more portable to use grep -E > than to use egrep. > > I agree. And IMHO that is a bug POSIX gratuitously introduced. > > That wouldn't be right, as POSIXLY_CORRECT governs misfeatures required > by POSIX, which isn't the case here: > > IMHO it is the case. The misfeature being fixed is POSIX unblessing > [ef]grep. > > But, whatever. Since it bothers you to use POSIXLY_CORRECT, let's invent > some other envvar that turns off the warning, like > "PLEASE_LET_ME_USE_EFGREP_I_DONT_CARE_ABOUT_POSIX", and Arnold and I > will set it and life can go on. > > https://bugs.gnu.org/49996 > > I'm unconvinced. What Simon's bug report says is "hey, why not deprecate > [ef]grep because it's time". Well, IMHO it's not time, and will never be > time, and "deprecation" merely means "cause trouble for users for no > real reason". My "pet issue" is the exact opposite of Simon's ... > > Without some way to turn off those warnings, GNU [ef]grep become > unusable without editing to remove the comment. It is completely > infeasible, not to mention a tremendous waste of time, to edit > everywhere on my systems that use them, after 40 years of historical > usage. > > I'm not saying scripts intended to be portable should not be changed (as > we know, they have had to be, because POSIX forced it). But all the > scripts in the world which are *not* needed to be portable don't need to > be changed. They just need to keep working and not be randomly broken by > outside forces. > > [ef]grep are fundamental names for the utility. Please reconsider. -k > > >
