Hi, much to my dismay I noticed that GREP_OPTIONS has been made obsolete. I usually kept the following in my .profile:
export GREP_OPTIONS='--color=tty --devices=skip' which was honored by GNU/grep and BSD/grep and ignored by e.g SUNWcsu/grep. Without GREP_OPTIONS, I have to put something like this in my .profile: if grep --version 2>/dev/null | egrep -q 'GNU|BSD' 2>/dev/null; then alias grep='grep --color=auto --devices=skip' fi But that leaves out all the other grep variants, so what I really have in my .profile now is something like this: if grep --version 2>/dev/null | egrep -q 'GNU|BSD' 2>/dev/null; then alias grep='grep --color=auto --devices=skip' alias egrep='egrep --color=auto --devices=skip' alias fgrep='fgrep --color=auto --devices=skip' alias zgrep='zgrep --color=auto --devices=skip' alias bzgrep='bzgrep --color=auto --devices=skip' alias xzgrep='xzgrep --color=auto --devices=skip' fi (and even that leaves out bzegrep, xzfgrep, etc.) I suspect that I'm doing it wrong - but what's the alternative to have some nice grep defaults and still be portable across platforms? Thanks, Christian. -- BOFH excuse #355: Boredom in the Kernel.