" there's a difference between avoiding fossilization and the kind of minimal, mathematical purity that we see GNU Grep trying to impose here. Unix has long sin

" there's a difference between avoiding fossilization and the kind of minimal, mathematical purity that we see GNU Grep trying to impose here. Unix has long since passed the point where it had that sort of minimalism in the standard commands. Modern Unix has all sorts of duplications and flourishes that aren't strictly necessary, and for good reasons." Well, really, the type of purity many of the original Unix hands desired was that each tool did one thing well, not that one tool did everything well. Some folks would say that putting the -E and -F flags in GNU grep in the first place instead of using egrep and fgrep was the wrong direction. Now GNU is wanting to further consolidate the hydra.