redundant binaries

[dan <dan@rn082110.mrs.umn.edu>]

I was looking through the contents of /bin when I noticed that the files grep,
egrep, and fgrep, were all identical.  Further investigation shows that they
determine how to act by analyzing their command line.

Here is how to reproduce what I found:

$ cd /bin; ls -l *grep
-rwxr-xr-x   3 root     root        75728 Apr 27  1998 egrep
-rwxr-xr-x   3 root     root        75728 Apr 27  1998 fgrep
-rwxr-xr-x   3 root     root        75728 Apr 27  1998 grep
$ diff grep egrep
$ diff grep fgrep
$

Also, I noticed that there are quite a few other packages, like perl and gzip,
and probably others, that have this same problem.

Is there a reason for having multiple copies of these files, and if not,
is it worth tracking them all down and filing bug reports?

-- 
Dan Gohman
gohmandj@cda.mrs.umn.edu