Re: saving backward compatibility :-)

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Once upon a time, Patrick O'Callaghan <pocallaghan@xxxxxxxxx> said:
> On Sat, 2023-04-29 at 10:23 -0400, Tom Horsley wrote:
> > I'd wager there are shell scripts using fgrep that were written on
> > the first pdp-11 unix and are still in use today
> 
> IIRC early PDP-11 UNIX (pre System V) only had grep. fgrep and egrep
> are later additions. (Not trying to counter your argument).

The warning (and presumably eventual removal) of egrep/fgrep is really
pretty dumb.  In most cases, the idea of removing deprecated
functionality is to remove stale code and/or reduce code complexity.
But there's zero benefit to removing egrep/fgrep, since the
functionality will still be there (as grep -E and grep -F), and the
"complexity" of each is a one-liner shell script (arguably, this could
just be a couple of lines in grep to detect argv[0] and use symlinks).

When running commands, egrep and fgrep are easier/shorter to type than
grep -E and grep -F (espcially since the options are capitalized).  I
can easily work around the stupidity by just making egrep/fgrep shell
aliases instead, bypassing the warning for interactive use, but that
doesn't make it any less dumb.

There is absolutely zero demonstrable benefit to this warning (and
eventual removal), except to break old scripts and old typing habits.
-- 
Chris Adams <linux@xxxxxxxxxxx>
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