I would like to report the following unrelated issues: (1) `grep --help` and `egrep --help` should report the version number.
(2) `egrep [abc]+ *.txt` works as expected, but if I try to do `egrep ^[abc]+ *.txt`, which anchors the pattern to the start of the line, I get no results, even though there are lines that match the pattern. (3) Specifying a pattern for FILE seems to work just fine unless one does a recursive search. (4) If one attempts to do a recursive search and omits the starting directory, it would be helpful if the default were the current working directory. An alternative would be to generate a warning or error message. Simply failing to produce any results is a bad design. (5) If one provides an invalid regex, e.g., something like '*xyz' (a regex can't begin with '*'), one should get a fatal error (grep and egrep accept such a regex without complaint, and simply return no results). Phillip M. Feldman
