diff --git a/util/README b/util/README
index 8e42476..bd3bece 100644
--- a/util/README
+++ b/util/README
@@ -1,6 +1,3 @@
 When porting Elk to a new architecture, you may want to compile and run
 alloca.c to check if your system's alloca() function is usable for Elk.
 See the leading comment in alloca.c.
-
-getversion is a trivial shell script to extract the Elk version number
-from the file README.  It is used by the build process.
diff --git a/util/getversion b/util/getversion
deleted file mode 100755
index 9930f68..0000000
--- a/util/getversion
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,5 +0,0 @@
-#!/bin/sh
-if [ $# != 1 ]; then
-    echo Usage: $0 README; exit 1
-fi
-exec grep "^This is release" $1 | awk '{print $4}'