After spending nearly an hour updating all of the scripts in the test framework for one of my open source projects to no longer use egrep, I’m going to say it:
We should not deprecate egrep and fgrep egrep and fgrep have been around since the 1970s, were in wide use well over 25 years ago on the SunOS machines we used at the time, and are widely supported, e.g. Busybox includes an fgrep and egrep. Even the Posix spec acknowledges that that should remain supported for the foreseeable future: “The old egrep and fgrep commands are likely to be supported for many years to come as implementation extensions, allowing historical applications to operate unmodified.” See https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/grep.html Here is the amount of headache I went through to replace egrep with grep -E: https://github.com/samboy/MaraDNS/commit/afc9d1800f3a641bdf1bf14d39802443a34c2b70 There are countless other shell scripts out there on countless machines which still use these commands. We should not lightly break widely deployed software, especially software which only needs two one-line shell scripts. -- Sam
