I don't see why. since grep -F and grep -E exemplify the code (PCRE aside) then why can't sys.argv() be checked for fgrep or egrep name, so that

  ln grep egrep;

just works? This feels like somebody rode their hobby horse round the table.

What's the point of deprecating and removing these, since all of the code that actually implements them still has to be there for grep -E and grep -F to work?

Thank Christ 3.7 will compile cleanly for many years to come. Let me guess.. RedHat sourced patch?

also noteworthy is that grep -P will now use PCRE2 instead of PCRE, which is potentially a breaking change for anyone using grep -P in their shell scripts