Re: problem with egrep and fgrep

[Stepan Kasal]

Hi,

On Sun, Sep 12, 2004 at 10:56:32AM -0600, Bob Proulx wrote:
> provide 'egrep' and 'fgrep' which are individual binaries [...]
> case to the 'ls' and 'dir' example

well, ls is 80 KB.

Grep used to be 70 KB.

Grep with included regex (which has to be the default until glibc regex
gets reliable) is about 250 KB, three copies make it 3/4 MB.  Oh, well.

> But I am sure there are other reasons of which I am not aware that
> went into the current implementation.

As I see the history from ChangeLog, there are no real reasons.
Every few years, someone changed [ef]grep to be a link, got bashed
quickly, and then changed it to a non-link install.
As noone is happy to get back to the previous version, they tried to
invent something new...

Yours,
        Stepan Kasal