After 104 commits from six different people, GNU grep was released Saturday, reports Phoronix.
The biggest change? “It’s now made more clear that if you are still relying on the egrep and fgrep commands, it’s past due for switching to just grep with the appropriate command-line arguments.”
The egrep and fgrep commands have been deprecated since 2007. Beginning with GNU Grep 3.8 today, calling these commands will now issue a warning to the user that instead they should use grep -E and grep -F, respectively.
Eventually, GNU Grep will drop the egrep / fgrep commands completely but there doesn’t seem to be a firm deadline yet for when that removal will happen.
From grep’s updated manual:
7th Edition Unix had commands egrep and fgrep that were the counterparts of the modern ‘grep -E’ and ‘grep -F’. Although breaking up grep into three programs was perhaps useful on the small computers of the