5 ms·

I’ve been using grep -E for a long time, I thought I remember it being from a warning from egrep or something.. can’t really remember for sure, though. Either

I’ve been using grep -E for a long time, I thought I remember it being from a warning from egrep or something.. can’t really remember for sure, though. Either way, I don’t see what the big deal is, just add an alias egrep='grep -E' If you’re worried about your non-interactive shell scripts, shopt -s expand_aliases; alias egrep='grep -E' and you can move on with your life. EDIT: I must’ve been warned by shellcheck EDIT2: here’s another one liner with one caveat being updates (also needs to be run as root) # unalias grep && unalias egrep && cp "$(command -v grep)" "$(dirname "$(command -v grep)")/egrep" EDIT3: just realized for most this will only ever come up in scripts because many distros already add alias egrep='grep -E' to your shell aliases (~/.bash_aliases, ~/.zshrc, etc). Thus you may only need the shopt -s expand_aliases.

3pt14159 4y ago
The problem is that we don't just live on our own machines. We hop around to different boxes and just being able to type what you are used to matters. My dotfiles and other tools don't go or even work everywhere. We shouldn't change the oldest parts of our OSes without a really good reason.
- acdha 4y ago
  I find this reasoning interesting since it's why I _stopped_ using egrep/fgrep around the turn of the century: because those aren't standard, it wasn't uncommon to find that you depended on some behaviour which wasn't available in the version installed on some random server but it worked when you used grep.
  - markstos 4y ago
    I don't remember why I stopped using the shorter `egrep` and only use `grep -E`, but I suspect this was the reason. I used to work on a variety of BSD and Linux servers. I'm fine with this clean-up and simplification. Eventually, there will be more future users of `grep` than past users.
    - acdha 4y ago
      Yeah, I worked with enough older systems (SunOS, Solaris, AIX, HPUX, FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD, etc.) that I don't remember which ones caused me to do that, either. I'm really glad it's no longer common to have things like hand-compiled installs of GNU utilities, especially since not every sysadmin was diligent about updating all of them.
  - 3pt14159 4y ago
    I switched to just grep, but it's still part of the same line of thinking. I really, really, really dislike it when something that used to be reliable changes or is removed. I understand and accept that things change, but when it's as simple as a symlink or what have you I really do not see the cost-benefit tradeoff for sunsetting something.
ComputerGuru 4y ago
It’s a matter of principle. If you wrote a script yesterday (or a year ago) and didn’t include that line, you need to re-release it today. That’s stupid. Also, you’re being very sanctimonious about this but what if you didn’t see this HN story. Would you know to do that for the next script you distribute?
- koprulusector 4y ago
  Frankly I can count on two hands the number of times I’ve used egrep in my life (same for grep -E). As long as I can remember I’ve relied on sed, awk, or find -regex for filtering output with regex. I only say this because I can’t relate to those that are upset about the change. That said, to answer your questions directly: hopefully you aren’t auto updating anywhere in production or important, so this won’t effect anything until the box has grep 3.8. Ubuntu 20.04 uses grep 3.4, for example. And the warning prints to stderr, so honestly, I'm having a difficult time seeing this being an actual problem for more than 0.1% of users. I’m not unsympathetic to those that it adversely affects, but I genuinely haven’t seen anyone point out any severe consequences of the change. I’m not saying it’s impossible, if someone has a real example (sorry, saying you might get a page on the weekend for a warning printed to stderr is a stretch), I’m all ears.
  - ur-whale 4y ago
    > Frankly I can count on two hands Emphasis on "I", which says strictly nothing of the rest of CLI users out there. We're very glad to learn that it is not a problem for you, but it brings very little to the conversation.
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      > We're very glad to learn that it is not a problem for you Worth reading the guidelines [0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - koprulusector 4y ago
      But neither does this comment.. do you have an example to share in response to my questions above?
tyingq 4y ago
I don't think aliases help in one common case listed in the article. That is, scripts run out of cron, that don't read initialization files. And that case will email on unexpected stderr writes.

3pt14159 4y ago

The problem is that we don't just live on our own machines. We hop around to different boxes and just being able to type what you are used to matters. My dotfiles and other tools don't go or even work everywhere. We shouldn't change the oldest parts of our OSes without a really good reason.

acdha 4y ago
I find this reasoning interesting since it's why I _stopped_ using egrep/fgrep around the turn of the century: because those aren't standard, it wasn't uncommon to find that you depended on some behaviour which wasn't available in the version installed on some random server but it worked when you used grep.
- markstos 4y ago
  I don't remember why I stopped using the shorter `egrep` and only use `grep -E`, but I suspect this was the reason. I used to work on a variety of BSD and Linux servers. I'm fine with this clean-up and simplification. Eventually, there will be more future users of `grep` than past users.
  - acdha 4y ago
    Yeah, I worked with enough older systems (SunOS, Solaris, AIX, HPUX, FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD, etc.) that I don't remember which ones caused me to do that, either. I'm really glad it's no longer common to have things like hand-compiled installs of GNU utilities, especially since not every sysadmin was diligent about updating all of them.
- 3pt14159 4y ago
  I switched to just grep, but it's still part of the same line of thinking. I really, really, really dislike it when something that used to be reliable changes or is removed. I understand and accept that things change, but when it's as simple as a symlink or what have you I really do not see the cost-benefit tradeoff for sunsetting something.

ComputerGuru 4y ago

It’s a matter of principle. If you wrote a script yesterday (or a year ago) and didn’t include that line, you need to re-release it today. That’s stupid. Also, you’re being very sanctimonious about this but what if you didn’t see this HN story. Would you know to do that for the next script you distribute?

koprulusector 4y ago
Frankly I can count on two hands the number of times I’ve used egrep in my life (same for grep -E). As long as I can remember I’ve relied on sed, awk, or find -regex for filtering output with regex. I only say this because I can’t relate to those that are upset about the change. That said, to answer your questions directly: hopefully you aren’t auto updating anywhere in production or important, so this won’t effect anything until the box has grep 3.8. Ubuntu 20.04 uses grep 3.4, for example. And the warning prints to stderr, so honestly, I'm having a difficult time seeing this being an actual problem for more than 0.1% of users. I’m not unsympathetic to those that it adversely affects, but I genuinely haven’t seen anyone point out any severe consequences of the change. I’m not saying it’s impossible, if someone has a real example (sorry, saying you might get a page on the weekend for a warning printed to stderr is a stretch), I’m all ears.
- ur-whale 4y ago
  > Frankly I can count on two hands Emphasis on "I", which says strictly nothing of the rest of CLI users out there. We're very glad to learn that it is not a problem for you, but it brings very little to the conversation.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    > We're very glad to learn that it is not a problem for you Worth reading the guidelines [0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - koprulusector 4y ago
    But neither does this comment.. do you have an example to share in response to my questions above?

tyingq 4y ago

I don't think aliases help in one common case listed in the article. That is, scripts run out of cron, that don't read initialization files. And that case will email on unexpected stderr writes.