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Comment by rwmj | Hacker News Reader

What is annoying is coreutils has deprecated egrep, fgrep, and now made them print stupid messages.

  $ egrep foo /etc/motd
  egrep: warning: egrep is obsolescent; using grep -E

There's no reason why we can't keep egrep and fgrep around forever, but instead we have to change all existing scripts and programs that might use them.

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You could alias egrep="grep -E" to avoid changing existing scripts. Sure, it's not ideal but it might tide you over in the meantime.

alias doesn't work in scripts. I could manually patch /usr/bin/egrep, but really why? What are we saving by getting rid of two microscopic shell scripts?

Alias at the top of your script. Sure /bin/bash doesn't read .bashrc when ran in batch mode, doesn't mean you can't patch your script.

Totally agree. Plus it adds stress to us old people who have been using egrep for years.

“Why they wanna go break all my shell scripts ?”

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