bug#26205: Unhappy with deprecating GREP_OPTIONS

[Thomas Güttler]

I am not happy with GREP_OPTIONS being deprecated.

I asked here for help, but received no solution I like:

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/351083/colored-grep-output-not-grep-options-not-alias

Here the question:

I want colored output of `grep`.

.... But

 * Strategy 1: GREP_OPTIONS. But this is deprecated. See 
http://www.gnu.org/software/grep/manual/html_node/Environment-Variables.html
 * Stragegy 2: GREP_COLORS look like a solution at the first sight, but this 
does something different.
 * Strategy 3: alias. This does not work for `find ... | xargs grep`, since 
xargs does not evaluate aliases.
 * Strategy 4: Write a simple wrapper script. No, I think this is too dirty and 
makes more trouble than it solves.
 * Strategy 5: patch the source code  - No
 * Strategy 6: Contact grep developers, ask for a replacement of GREP_OPTIONS
 * Strategy NICE-and-EASY: ... this is missing. I have no clue.

How to solve this?


Now I follow Strategy 6.

Why is GREP_OPTIONS deprecated?

I guess this can do confusing things if you exclude directories via this 
environment variable.

But setting color=auto looks like something which does not do harm. May be I am 
too naive. Then please tell me.

What do you think?

Regards,
  Thomas Güttler


--
http://www.thomas-guettler.de/