Hi there, So it seems the warning that appeared when running with -r and no paths for the past few years wasn't simply a caution about an ineffectual argument combination, but actually an omen that some breaking change in a standard tool was due any day now.
It seems with Debian testing, that day has arrived, and now my very old shell macros no longer function as they once did. Aside from sharing my opinion on fundamental changes to old and very mature standard tools such as this, would I perhaps be overly hopeful in assuming those responsible planned accordingly for users such as myself, and have some alternative mechanism – perhaps one that just so happens to have not made it into the man page, that restores the old behaviour? Right now my only option appears to be parsing the grep command line from my shell macros, to figure out whether -r should be passed, without risking grep doing something it's never done in any implementation for the history of UNIX that I am aware of. David
