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The shell happens to be a programming tool and not just an interactive command interpreter. There are whole books on how to write shell scripts portably across various Unix-y platforms. Many of the examples in those books will now throw warnings on systems using the GNU tools.

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If a book on writing portable shell scripts across *nix platforms depends on commands not specified by POSIX, I don't think those books are doing their job very well.

POSIX.2 wasn't a standard until 1992. Perhaps it's the standard at fault for specifying the -E and -F flags rather than specifying the tools that existed in v7 in 1979. Authors and publishers didn't just pause for 13 years to wait and see.

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