Re: grep 2.5 make install fails with error: symbolix link

[Stepan Kasal]

Hello,

On Fri, Feb 20, 2004 at 08:31:21PM +0000, Karel Kulhav? wrote:
> If egrep and fgrep symbolic links exist during installation of grep
> (make install from the source tarball), the make install crashes with error.
> One must manually remove them BOTH and rerun the make install.
> 
> I consider this being a bug. Do you consider it being a bug too?

it surely is a bug.  For future releases, things changed: shell wrappers
will be installed instead of symlinks.

The reason is that the behaviour of a program should not depend on its
name.  If you mind the performance hit, use "grep -F" and "grep -E"
instead of fgrep and egrep, respectivelly.  The fgrep and egrep cmds
are considered deprecated.

It was hard for me to swallow the above change, I admit.
But I think it worth it to give up some parts of the UNIX tradition.

Mej se,
        Stepan Kasal