The cost of egrep and fgrep is just two symbolic links. Some people though would rather talk about ‘libre’ and ‘free as in speech’ and ‘free as in beer’ than talk at all about the user experience. And they wonder why most people just run windows or macOS, but they’ll never understand.
A cost that needs to be paid every time you invoke them (a double lookup in the filesystem). Just use a regular link.
(I felt a pedantic response would be in the spirit of this change by the GNU project).
> A cost that needs to be paid every time you invoke them (a double lookup in the filesystem). Just use a regular link.
I'm having a bit of trouble understanding the outrage. Can't all egrep/fgrep in all scripts be fixed once in one or two commands and remain fixed?
$ sed -i 's/fgrep/grep\ -F/' *.sh
I see it as getting accustomed to bells and whistles on some modern shell (like tab completion on zsh and others), then having to use a shell on another system without them (some ragged old korn) and getting tripped up... and the ultimate solution is to be conscious that these things don't work everywhere, so don't be too reliant on them.
And that doesn't even open the can of worms relating to quoting...
$ sed -i 's/fgrep/grep\ -F/' $(grep -rw '/' -e 'fgrep')
I don't manage docker images, but surely there must be a way to do something as simple as replace a file in one image,[1] and if that can be done, doing so in all images is just one clever step away.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40895859/how-can-i-overw...
What do you mean by "use a symbolic link" (I'm familiar with `ln -s` fwiw) the alias carries the command switch, how do you do that with a link?
# example
alias egrep='grep -E'
/some/path/fgrep
#!/bin/sh
exec /usr/bin/grep -E "$@"
cat `which egrep`
#!/bin/sh
exec grep -E "$@"