[ILUG] grep, egrep, fgrep

[Scanlan, Brian (5188)]

Oh, I agree they shouldn't be seperate files...

Remember a while back when Microsoft announced some technology
vaguely similar to symlinks, and all the slashdotters guffawed
posting crap like "Micky$oft should do a man ln!! INFORMATION
SHOULD BE FREE!" or something similar?

(You don't have to: I found it...
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/03/02/0833211.shtml)

Well, maybe Redhat and co. should do a "man ln"... ;)

Disk wasting sillyness, methinks. Still can't find a decent
reason for this.

Incidentally, on Digital Unix V4.0 they do similar stuff:
grep and egrep are the same size, but different files, which
fgrep is smaller, but on HPUX 10.20 and 11, the three files are
simply linked.

-----Original Message-----
From: Padraig Brady [mailto:Padraig at AnteFacto.com]
Sent: 02 February 2001 15:12
To: Scanlan, Brian (5188)
Cc: 'ilug at linux.ie'
Subject: Re: [ILUG] grep, egrep, fgrep


Hmm this is interesting.

pixelbeat at pixelbeat:~$ ls -li /bin/ls /bin/dir /bin/vdir
1120272 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root       40848 Jan  5 14:10 /bin/dir
1120274 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root       40848 Jan  5 14:10 /bin/ls
1120280 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root       40848 Jan  5 14:10 /bin/vdir

I don't agree that they should be different files.
Why would you ever want to rename dir/ls/vdir/grep/fgrep/egrep/... ?
maybe if you had links with a different name but why?
What would be more appropriate in my opinion would be to return
an error if argv[0] wasn't one of the accepted values.

Padraig.