Subject: five grep / egrep issues

From: Phillip Feldman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2018 20:48:31 -0700

I would like to report the following unrelated issues:

(1) `grep --help` and `egrep --help` should report the version number.

(2) `egrep [abc]+ *.txt` works as expected, but if I try to do `egrep
^[abc]+ *.txt`, which anchors the pattern to the start of the line, I get
no results,
even though there are lines that match the pattern.

(3) Specifying a pattern for FILE seems to work just fine unless one does a
recursive search.

(4) If one attempts to do a recursive search and omits the starting
directory, it would be helpful if the default were the current working
directory. An
alternative would be to generate a warning or error message. Simply failing
to produce any results is a bad design.

(5) If one provides an invalid regex, e.g., something like '*xyz' (a regex
can't begin with '*'), one should get a fatal error (grep and egrep accept
such a
regex without complaint, and simply return no results).

Phillip M. Feldman