We are stuck with egrep and fgrep (unless you like beating people)
I use fgrep all the time.  Why should I spend time converting scripts, and retraining my fingers, and forever after taking longer to type grep -F?  This is a breaking change that has no upside, only downside.  It is idiocy.<p>Just to elaborate, there must be many thousands (hundreds of thousands? millions?) of shell scripts out there that use fgrep.  For no reason at all (whatever maintenance burden fgrep represents must be far outweighed by the time wasted debating this issue), these scripts will no longer work.  There is no guarantee that defining an alias somewhere is going to fix all your usages of fgrep.  And even if it did, the cost for <i>every single installation that is affected</i> of someone realizing there is a problem, finding the source of the problem, figuring out that an alias will fix it, making sure that that alias gets preserved after updates, and testing that everything now works will exceed the benefit to the maintainers of grep (which is actually negative, as explained above).  So looked at from a community-wide perspective, the cost is many thousands of times greater than any possible (but actually non-existent) benefit.<p>And as the post mentions, there are also all the books, and all the stackoverflow answers, that use fgrep, and which will now have non-working code.<p>As for the argument that this is open-source software maintained by volunteers, who can therefore do whatever they wish - if you are a maintainer of widely-used open-source software, and decide that you personally are not interested in working in a manner that benefits the community of users, then you should resign and let someone else take over.