Greetings! The attached patch add a `--pipe` option to grep. When used, grep only exits with with nonzero status on error. In particular, it doesn't signal "match" / "no match" through the exit code. Here's an example using Bash: # enable automatic error handling set -eo pipefail # grep for issues in a logfile to produce a report cat logfile | grep issue | sort --unique If grep doesn't find "issue" in its input (which is not an error, obviously), it exits with status 1. Bash interprets this nonzero exit code as an error and terminates with an error itself. In order to fix that bug in the above script, you currently have to replace `grep ...` with `grep ... || [ $? = 1 ]`, which is not really readable. As alternative, I've implemented a `--pipe` option, which only returns nonzero on actual errors, but not when there is no match. This is a bit of a complementary option to `--quiet`. Open tasks here: * FSF paperwork is not finished, so obviously the patch can't be applied yet. * Should I add a `-p` to complement the long `--pipe`? * Should I call it `--pipe` at all? The other alternative I came up with was `--filter`. I don't really like either of them very much. Cheers! Uli
gnu-grep-pipe-option.patch
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