Actually it turns out that, at least in debian 11, you were right on the money: cat `which egrep` #!/bin/sh exec grep -E "$@" But I agree that it

Actually it turns out that, at least in debian 11, you were right on the money: cat `which egrep` #!/bin/sh exec grep -E "$@" But I agree that it would be cleaner and trivial to implement this behavior by depending on argv[0], GNU style guide be damned.