eliminate use of egrep and \# (fixes #1019660)

This piping of (e)grep into sed struck me as redundant, so I got rid of it.

I note that the first instance of egrep (looking for ttys) actually seems a bit beffuddled, since the egrep is looking for tty at the start of the line (among other things) but if it found it the sed would ignore that because it only accepts tty preceded by a space -- that's why I'm not bothering with preserving the start of line matching.

I've also grabbed the removal of \ before # from Vincent Lefevre's patch.