Everyone has their own story, and one’s person’s experience can be very different from another person’s experience. I used egrep a whole lot, dozens of times for the automated test setup I have for my open source project. I had to spend most of an hour this morning updating that code to no longer use egrep—a non-trivial task. Here’s the amount of hassle breaking egrep has given me:
This is just one open source project. I’ve seen fgrep in use for well over 25 years, back on the SunOS boxes we used at the time. egrep apparently has been around for a very long time too. Just because it didn’t get enshrined in a Posix document—OK, according to Paul Eggert it was made obsolete by Posix in 1992, but apparently no one got the telegram and it’s been a part of Linux since the beginning and is also a part of busybox—doesn’t mean it’s something which should be removed.
I’m just glad I caught this thread and was able to “update” my code.
https://github.com/samboy/MaraDNS/commit/afc9d1800f3a641bdf1...
This is just one open source project. I’ve seen fgrep in use for well over 25 years, back on the SunOS boxes we used at the time. egrep apparently has been around for a very long time too. Just because it didn’t get enshrined in a Posix document—OK, according to Paul Eggert it was made obsolete by Posix in 1992, but apparently no one got the telegram and it’s been a part of Linux since the beginning and is also a part of busybox—doesn’t mean it’s something which should be removed.
I’m just glad I caught this thread and was able to “update” my code.