Question

Recently I‘m using OSX mountain lion. when I use Terminal.app, I found that my grep can not work again.

no mater what I do, the grep always report a warning:

 $ grep --version

    *usage: grep [-abcDEFGHhIiJLlmnOoPqRSsUVvwxZ] [-A num] [-B num] [-C[num]]
        [-e pattern] [-f file] [--binary-files=value] [--color=when]
        [--context[=num]] [--directories=action] [--label] [--line-buffered]
        [--null] [pattern] [file ...]*

My grep is locate at /usr/bin/:

    $ ls -lh /usr/bin/grep

    *-rwxr-xr-x  3 root  wheel    29K Jul 26 22:52 /usr/bin/grep*

I am not sure IS this grep too small, it’s only 29K.

Answer 1

Do you have GREP_OPTIONS set (to something invalid) ? Typing env will dump your environment variables and you can look through these to find it (I’d normally use grep, but…)