Re: grep not taking last conflicting option as choice?

[Bob Proulx]

Hi Linda,

I am just going to make a note here for any readers that you sent
another message over to bug-grep and it is being discussed there.

Bob


Linda Walsh wrote:
> Isn't it usually the case with conflicting options that the last
> one gets taken as the choice, with choices on the command line
> overriding choices in the environment?
> 
> Grep (2.14) doesn't seem to follow this convention.
> 
> Is there a reason why grep doesn't or did it
> used to and now chooses to do nothing in the case of
> conflicting options?  (eg. -P v. -E)
> 
> I think the earlier behavior, **__especially__** in respect
> to cmdline values overriding the environment (GREP_OPTIONS)
> is more significantly more useful.  Though even make files
> add to their own ENV vars and append to them -- so it seems
> later options overriding earlier options would be good in that
> case too.
> 
> But without cmd line overriding GREP_OPTIONS, then there seems
> to be no way to specify various defaults.