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grep-2.5.1: broken egrep
From: |
Nelson H. F. Beebe |
Subject: |
grep-2.5.1: broken egrep |
Date: |
Thu, 4 Apr 2002 18:45:37 -0700 (MST) |
Five days ago, I installed
ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/grep/grep-2.5.1.tar.gz
on our local systems (16 UNIX flavors).
Since then, I've been getting failure notices from one of my cron jobs
with the error
Usage: grep -hblcnsviw pattern file . . .
I've only just caught up enough on my backlog to track it down.
Here's the story:
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.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 -
- Center for Scientific Computing FAX: +1 801 585 1640, +1 801 581 4148 -
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-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- grep-2.5.1: broken egrep,
Nelson H. F. Beebe <=