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Yeah, this sounds really misguided. If they change/add functionality, why not move that to a new option? Those who want the new way can use the new feature, and scripts won't act differently depending on which version is installed.

New features should get new options; they should not move old features to new flags and put the new features on the old flags. Nuts.




Increasing the number of options and switches has downsides, it makes the software more complex to use.


Hehe, you know what makes the software more complex to use? Having to grep in the output of "grep --version" before deciding which switch to pass to grep.. :)


You don't need to do that, just always use -R :)


We'll get right on inventing that time machine so everyone can go back in time to the introduction of the -r flag and warn themselves ;).


And note that it will make your code more compatible with other, POSIX-compliant, versions of grep.




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