[bug-grep] grep-2.5.1a bug report: broken egrep and fgrep

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

In mail of Thu, 4 Apr 2002 18:45:37 -0700 (MST), I reported a problem
with grep-2.5.1 on the address@hidden list.  On Friday, I
installed the new grep-2.5.1a release, and over the weekend,
discovered from failing cron jobs that the bug that I reported has not
yet been fixed.

Here it is again, from my original message:

>> ...
>> In past grep releases, egrep and fgrep were symbolic (or hard) links
>> to grep.
>> 
>> However, in this new release, egrep and fgrep are shell scripts:
>> 
>>         % cat /usr/local/bin/egrep
>>         #!/bin/sh
>>         exec grep -E ${1+"$@"}
>> 
>>         % cat /usr/local/bin/fgrep
>>         #!/bin/sh
>>         exec grep -F ${1+"$@"}
>> 
>> Cron jobs normally run with a limited PATH, often just /bin:/usr/bin.
>> Even though my cron job explicitly invoked /usr/local/bin/egrep, that
>> script then runs /bin/grep, which is not the GNU version, and it does
>> not recognize the -E (or -F) option.
>> 
>> I'm patching these scripts locally so that the last line reads
>> 
>>         exec /usr/local/bin/grep -E ${1+"$@"}
>> 
>> and
>> 
>>         exec /usr/local/bin/grep -F ${1+"$@"}
>> 
>> respectively.
>> 
>> It is imperative that future releases of GNU grep account for this:
>> those scripts should have
>> 
>>         exec $prefix/bin/grep ...
>> 
>> where $prefix is replaced at install time by the value in the
>> Makefile.
>> ...

In the local patch that I made this morning, I replaced /usr/local/bin
by `dirname $0`, so that my patched script works even on systems where
prefix is something other than /usr/local (I have at least three such
systems).

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- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: address@hidden  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       address@hidden  address@hidden -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe  -
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