grep-2.5.1: broken egrep

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

Five days ago, I installed

     ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/grep/grep-2.5.1.tar.gz

on our local systems (16 UNIX flavors).

Since then, I've been getting failure notices from one of my cron jobs
with the error

        Usage: grep -hblcnsviw pattern file . . .

I've only just caught up enough on my backlog to track it down.

Here's the story:

In past grep releases, egrep and fgrep were symbolic (or hard) links
to grep.

However, in this new release, egrep and fgrep are shell scripts:

        % cat /usr/local/bin/egrep
        #!/bin/sh
        exec grep -E ${1+"$@"}

        % cat /usr/local/bin/fgrep
        #!/bin/sh
        exec grep -F ${1+"$@"}

Cron jobs normally run with a limited PATH, often just /bin:/usr/bin.
Even though my cron job explicitly invoked /usr/local/bin/egrep, that
script then runs /bin/grep, which is not the GNU version, and it does
not recognize the -E (or -F) option.

I'm patching these scripts locally so that the last line reads

        exec /usr/local/bin/grep -E ${1+"$@"}

and

        exec /usr/local/bin/grep -F ${1+"$@"}

respectively.

It is imperative that future releases of GNU grep account for this:
those scripts should have

        exec $prefix/bin/grep ...

where $prefix is replaced at install time by the value in the
Makefile.

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- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
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