Thread

Re: egrep is obsolescent

Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org> — 2026-05-13T15:32:28Z

On 13.05.26 17:24, Tom Lane wrote:
> While running pgperltidy just now on my recently-updated
> Linux workstation, I got
> 
> $ src/tools/pgindent/pgperltidy .
> egrep: warning: egrep is obsolescent; using grep -E
> 
> OK, that's a bit in-your-face, but it's not inaccurate.
> AFAICT, "egrep" has never been in POSIX, while "grep -E"
> has been there at least since POSIX 2008.
> 
> So I propose the attached patch, which is just s/egrep/grep -E/g.

Looks good to me.

> I did not touch the two usages in port/aix/mkldexport.sh, though.
> I'm not sure what the standardization situation is in AIX, and
> this warning doesn't seem like something they'd do anyway.

It appears that those invocations don't actually need the "e" part of 
egrep, so they could just be grep?

> There is also a reference in configure, which is not a problem
> because it tries "grep -E" first.

Yeah, Autoconf addressed this some decades ago, so it should be fine.