Hi Jim, After following your comment, the error (I am not sure now if I could call it an error) has gone. So you were right, it was due to the way I was handling positional parameters in my .profile file.
Sol: changing from grep () { /usr/bin/grep --color=auto $* } to grep () { /usr/bin/grep --color=auto "$@" } solved it. (Not sure ';' is required here ) -Bibek On Tue, Jul 26, 2016 at 10:07 AM, Jim Meyering <j...@meyering.net> wrote: > On Tue, Jul 26, 2016 at 7:46 AM, bibek ghimire <gbi...@gmail.com> wrote: > > /usr/bin/grep --color=auto $* > > That function is erroneous due to the use of unquoted $*. > Use this instead, which fixes that, and also works when the executable > grep is not in /usr/bin: > > grep() { env grep --color=auto "$@"; } >