7th Edition Unix had commands egrep and fgrep that were the counterparts of the modern ‘grep -E’ and ‘grep -F’. Although breaking up grep into three programs was perhaps useful on the small computers of the 1970s, egrep and fgrep were not standardized by POSIX and are no longer needed. In the current GNU implementation, egrep and fgrep issue a warning and then act like their modern counterparts; eventually, they are planned to be removed entirely.
Considering how drastically GNU departs from the bare POSIX interface in some of their tools, I find it strangely pedantic how the maintainers hold up the standard in this specific case. Considering the Linux mantra of "Never Break Userspace", I can't find a good reason to drop the binaries (or the script equivalents of calling grep -E/-F) besides uprooting a historical choice that never hurt anybody (with little benefit and a plethora of potential consequences) in the name of better-late-than-never correctness.
7th Edition Unix had commands egrep and fgrep that were the counterparts of the modern ‘grep -E’ and ‘grep -F’. Although breaking up grep into three programs was perhaps useful on the small computers of the 1970s, egrep and fgrep were not standardized by POSIX and are no longer needed. In the current GNU implementation, egrep and fgrep issue a warning and then act like their modern counterparts; eventually, they are planned to be removed entirely.
Considering how drastically GNU departs from the bare POSIX interface in some of their tools, I find it strangely pedantic how the maintainers hold up the standard in this specific case. Considering the Linux mantra of "Never Break Userspace", I can't find a good reason to drop the binaries (or the script equivalents of calling grep -E/-F) besides uprooting a historical choice that never hurt anybody (with little benefit and a plethora of potential consequences) in the name of better-late-than-never correctness.