On Wed, 11 Mar 2015 at 11:15, Paul Eggert wrote: > On 03/05/2015 11:24 AM, Christian Kujau wrote: > > that (and the bits below) seem to confirm that there's no simple > > alternative to GREP_OPTIONS > > I don't see why the script solution is not considered 'simple'.
Hm, I don't understand how the script solution _can_ be considered 'simple', but maybe I haven't made it clear enough. With GREP_OPTIONS, one only had to put a single line in .profile, which was honored by all the GNU grep variants that supported GREP_OPTIONS. export GREP_OPTIONS="...." Without GREP_OPTIONS, one has to 1) Write a script for each grep variant (fgrep, zgrep, egrep, etc.) 2) put $HOME/bin in $PATH I'd consider this much more complicated, especially 1) - either write a script for eeach variant or write a single script that pays attention on how it's called and put symlinks in $HOME/bin. Also: on systems that do _not_ support these options, I cannot use this setup. To elaborate on this a bit more: I usually have a fairly static set of .dotfiles that I'd like to install in $HOME on a new machine. For instance, I'd set HISTTIMEFORMAT which is honored by newer versions of 'bash' but maybe the system does not have a bash installed and then this variable is just ignored, no harm done. Same with GREP_OPTIONS - if GNU/grep was installed, the variable would be honored, other grep implementations might choose to ignore it. If $HOME/bin/grep is really "grep --devices=skip", a the Solaris version of grep would bail with "unrecognized option". Of course, I understand the flip side of the coin: if GREP_OPTIONS gets set, maybe even system wide, shell scripts may behave differently. But that's true for every environment variable. If PATH omits /bin:/usr/bin, scripts maye behave very differently. Same for LC_ALL or or something else. Even GNU/tar has TAR_OPTIONS, so I don't really understand why GREP_OPTIONS is being dropped, just because some script broke because it didn't pay attention to environment variables. > Anyway, it's > worth documenting the script alternative, so I installed the attached into the > manual and am marking the bug as done. I didn't even expect that a mail the mailing list would open a formal bug report :-) Christian. -- BOFH excuse #277: Your Flux Capacitor has gone bad.