Linux Magazine: What’s GNU in Old Utilities, Part Two

“Years ago, there was a saying that Unix beginners use grep
because it’s all they know about, intermediate users use fgrep
because it’s supposed to be faster, and advanced users use egrep
because they’ve tested it. Each of those three variations used to
be its own separate program that did different searches. But no
more. The single GNU grep binary has a –F switch to do
fixed-string searches like fgrep and a –E switch to do
extended regular expression-powered egrep searches. GNU egrep is
simply a shell script now, like this:

#!/bin/sh
exec grep –E ${1+”$@”} …”

Complete
Story