Mail Archives: cygwin/2003/02/02/15:28:14
Ken,
At 12:05 2003-02-02, G. Ken Holman wrote:
>Hi folks,
>
>I used to use one of the Cygwin B packages where the egrep.exe utility
>was included.
"B" as in beta? b17, b18... One of those? Ancient history and truly the
good old days of Cygnus / Cygwin.
>I'm on an XP system and I downloaded replacement packages yesterday
>and ensured that I included the "grep" package.
>
>I went to use "egrep.exe" and found it wasn't installed. I did find
>an egrep.1 but it just points to grep.
That's a common technique in Unix programming. Because by universal
convention the name of the program _as it was invoked_ is passed as
argument 0, a single binary can have "multiple personalities." This can
be accomplished by either symbolic or hard links. Grep is one such
multifaceted program. When invoked as "egrep" it behaves like egrep.
>I reviewed my installation and found "Keep" for grep package 2.5-1
>(indicating to me the package has been installed), and see egrep
>listed in the package description. I also see fgrep listed, though
>I'm not interested in using it.
>
>Neither egrep.exe nor fgrep.exe exist in my bin/ directory, as I would
>have expected. Did this fall through the cracks?
Look for the symlinks "fgrep -> grep" and "egrep -> grep". Symlinks
don't include the ".exe" suffix even if they're pointing to a ".exe"
file. The same goes for the symlink target name, too.
>In the short term I can copy grep.exe to egrep.exe because my existing
>batch files rely on it by name, so I just thought I'd report this in
>case either:
>
> (1) the files get added or
>
> (2) the package description removes references to the files not included.
I don't believe anything needs to be fixed in the package. Perhaps for
some reason your system lost the symlinks that supply fgrep and egrep?
>I hope this helps.
>
>................... Ken
>
>p.s. http://cygwin.com/bugs.html points to
>http://cygwin.com/lists.html and says where *not* to send bugs, but
>not where bugs should be sent for problems like this ... I would have
>thought that would be a FAQ: "which bugs (by example) go to which mail lists?"
Randall Schulz
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