dependency on $PATH in egrep

[Wolf, Sven]

Hello, GNU,

I have an observation for you.  I'd call it a complaint except that our 
installation may be old/customized and there may be issues I'm not considering 
here.

One implementation of egrep on Solaris machines at my company is a shell script 
(it happens to be installed at /package/grep/bin/egrep.  There is a soft link 
to it at /usr/local/bin/egrep.  The former has a timestamp of 2005-05-20.  
/package/grep/bin/grep appears to be GNU's grep.)  The egrep implementation is:
#!/bin/sh
exec grep -E ${1+"$@"}

This has a dependency on $PATH in that grep is called without an explicit path. 
 If this implementation is your doing (/package/grep/bin/grep has the same 
timestamp and is from GNU) and can be fixed, please do.  If it's already fixed, 
thanks.

This dependency bit me in that a call to egrep from my own shell script with an 
explicit path nevertheless failed when called from a cron job because the 
script delegated to /usr/bin/grep, which lacks the -E option.

Cheers,
Sven Wolf


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