We are stuck with egrep and fgrep (unless you like beating people)
There seems to be a lot of confusion in this discussion about what the change is and how egrep and fgrep work. These are not symlinks like some have suggested but rather shell scripts. You can see the exact commit diff here:https://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=grep.git;a=blobdiff;f...I remember around ~10 years ago being told "you should never use `egrep` because it is slower than `grep -E`." precisely because the former requires extra forks() compared to the latter. However I'd counter that advice saying "if you're concerned about the performance of forks() then why are you running your code as a shell script to begin with?"... and I stand by that assessment now. In fact it would probably take me longer to type `-E` than it would for any modern system to run fork() (and I'm sure as hell not planning on using `grep` inside any hot loops!)I think what will likely happen here is that distro maintainers will either remove that warning themselves or take ownership of the `egrep` and `fgrep` shell scripts. I'd be surprised if that warning made its way to the mainstream distros. I also wouldn't be surprised if the GNU grep maintainers did a u-turn on this change -- though it has already been committed to git for more than a year now and this is the first I've heard people complain about the change.