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collinfunk | 4 months ago

> See also the recent insanity of GNU grep suddenly tossing an error when invoked as "fgrep". You just don't do that folks.

The 'fgrep' and 'egrep' didn't throw errors, it would just send a warning to standard error before behaving as expected.

Those commands were never standardized, and everyone is better off using 'grep -F' and 'grep -E' respectively.

discuss

ajross|4 months ago

> didn't throw errors, it would just send a warning to standard error

Noted without comment. Except to say that I've had multiple scripts of my own break via "just" discovering garbage in the output streams.

> Those commands were never standardized

"Those commands" were present in v7 unix in 1979!

larusso|4 months ago

I think he means POSIX. Didn’t check but in some cases posix only covers some options a tool provides not all. It’s a hard lesson I learned while keeping shell scripts portable between Linux and macOS.