腹黒い茶 says to YSITD
-E, --extended-regexp Interpret pattern as an extended regular expression (i.e. force grep to behave as egrep). -e pattern, --regexp=pattern Specify a pattern used during the search of the input: an input line is selected if it matches any of the specified patterns. This option is most useful when multiple -e options are used to specify multiple patterns, or when a pattern begins with a dash (`-').