Re: Why grep still exists?

[Joseph Barillari <jbarilla@princeton.edu>]

>>>>> "j" == jqdkf  <jqdkf@zju.edu.cn> writes:

    j> Hi,
    j> I'm just wondering why grep still exists in every distribution of UNIX
    j> or UNIX like system. As egrep can support a full featured regular
    j> expression, it is much more powerful than grep. Is it only for backport
    j> support?

Debian includes GNU grep, which takes the place of vanilla grep,
egrep, and fgrep.

jdb@bigbox:~$ ls -l /bin | grep grep
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           33 Apr 21 12:02 egrep
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           33 Apr 21 12:02 fgrep
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root        67948 Apr 21 12:02 grep
-rwxr-xr-x    3 root     root         2944 Apr 16 14:35 zegrep
-rwxr-xr-x    3 root     root         2944 Apr 16 14:35 zfgrep
-rwxr-xr-x    3 root     root         2944 Apr 16 14:35 zgrep
jdb@bigbox:~$ cat /bin/[ef]grep
#!/bin/sh
exec grep -E ${1+"$@"}
#!/bin/sh
exec grep -F ${1+"$@"}

--Joe 

-- 
Joseph Barillari -- http://barillari.org