[Poiesis]

As a software developer, I have long-since ingrained the behavior of looking up the documentation before I assume something works in a particular way. Perhaps doubly so when shell scripting, where I have to verify if I can rely on a particular package being present, or the minimum version of something I can expect, or what the output is guaranteed to be.

When I was considering using fgrep, I looked it up; lo and behold, it's not part of the POSIX standard. So I used the option instead, and have since.

I'm a little puzzled why people have problems with these little things when it feels like it's pretty common for tools to change given enough time (for example, ifconfig and netstat to ip and ss). It's just essentially an API that gradually refines over time.

[barrkel]

It's not that common for tools that have been around for decades, and don't have system dependencies (like your network configuration examples do) to change.

egrep and fgrep are used on ad hoc command lines daily, and option alternatives are less convenient to use. I personally use 'egrep -o' and 'fgrep -f <(...)' all the time. I already find it tedious to have to type 'sed -r' and am half-considering wrapping it in an 'esed' variant.

Eliminating egrep and fgrep is change for the sake of change. Removing a couple of hard links from a few bin directories would be the total positive achievement, at the cost of years of work removing the utilities from scripts - or more likely, adding the links back, or variants thereof, like shell scripts which add -E / -F as required.