Re: [bug-grep] egrep and fgrep script assume path

[Paul Eggert]

Stepan Kasal <address@hidden> writes:

> On Fri, Jan 28, 2005 at 09:42:27PM -0800, Paul Eggert wrote:
>> How about the enclosed patch instead? [...]
>> it resurrects the files egrepmat.c and fgrepmat.c
>
> I think that is has one slight flaw: "egrep -F" shouldn't work.

Why not?  Is there any harm in adding support for the -F, -G, -E, and
-X options to all the grep variants?

If you really see a harm there, I can rewrite the patch accordingly;
but it seems a bit odd to me that "grep" would accept some options
that "egrep" and "fgrep" would arbitrarily reject.  That will
complicate the documentation, usage strings, etc.  And it would make
-G a weird case: "grep -G" is no different from "grep", but "egrep -G"
and "fgrep -G" are invalid, which is quite odd.

> Yet I want grep to include several ways of supporting egrep and fgrep,
> which can be chosen at configure time.  Thus I'll merge your patch with the
> one I posted yesterday.

That would make some sense, for implementations that are short on disk
for example.  But please, let's make the default conform to the GNU
coding standards.