Subject: Re: bug#17080: [PATCH] egrep, fgrep: go back to shell scripts

From: Eric Blake <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2014 17:21:16 -0600

On 03/23/2014 06:21 PM, Paul Eggert wrote:
> Although egrep's and fgrep's switch from shell scripts to
> executables may have made sense in 2005, it complicated
> maintenance and recently has caused subtle performance bugs.
> Go back to the old way of doing things, as it's simpler and more
> easily separated from the mainstream implementation.  This should
> be good enough nowadays, as POSIX has withdrawn egrep/fgrep and
> portable applications should be using -E/-F anyway.

Possibly related to whoever wants to tackle writing 'egrep' as a C
wrapper program - you need to consider what happens when the user
supplies program_transform_name as part of their configure arguments.
This recent autoconf thread picked on grep as an example - so we'd
better get the example right :)

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/autoconf/2014-04/msg00011.html

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org