grep has the great strength of near-ubiquitous installation. If you find yourself on a Unix-like system, it will have grep. Perhaps if you only ever really work

grep has the great strength of near-ubiquitous installation. If you find yourself on a Unix-like system, it will have grep. Perhaps if you only ever really work on a very small set of systems, then this doesn't matter, but for those of us who frequently need to work on different systems and don't always have the ability to install new packages, grep does a fine job. In fact, it has a lot in common with vi here: you can (nearly) always count on having it available.