Changing jobs and finding myself doing a lot more in the shell has had me tweaking my working environment a fair bit lately. Part of this involved wanting to highlight matches when using
grep since I found myself grepping more in the last few weeks than the entire year prior to that.
The most pedestrian way of doing this is to invoke
grep with the
--color option, which according to
man grep may be set to
"never",
"always" or
"auto". What it fails to point out is the important difference between
"always" and
"auto" (more of which later) but having experimented briefly with
"always" and seen what I expected I proceeded with the assumption that it was a perfectly reasonable way to do things.
The prospect of typing
--color=always all the time was not appealing however, and so after a quick search I hit upon the fact that one can set the environment variable
GREP_OPTIONS to contain options to be passed when
grep is invoked. My
.bash_profile was swiftly modified to include
export GREP_OPTIONS='--color=always'. And everything was good.
Except not really.
Later that week I was experimenting with some things from an old BASH book I had hanging around the house for years but never really dug into. One of said things was a function to create an
ls command that filtered by date. Call it
lsd (the book did) and it'd work thus:
> lsd 'may 18'
May 11 10:01 foo-report
May 11 10:42 cats.db
Except the weird part is that it didn't quite work right for me. The function was defined like this:
date=$1
ls -l | grep -i "^.\{38\}$date" | cut -c39-
For the uninitiated, that
cut command is saying to cut the output from column 39 on through to the end of the line, the idea being to transform the regular output from ls -l which looks like this:
-rw-r--r-- 1 jarcher 530219169 76 May 11 10:01 foo-report
-rwxr-xr-x 1 jarcher 530219169 127 May 11 10:42 cats.db
to the shortened date/filename form. Column 39 being where the date part starts. What was weird though was that my output didn't seem to be cutting in the right place. I found I had to cut further to the right, which at the time puzzled me, but not enough to spend enough cycles thinking about why this might be.
The following week I was tooling around with
git flow since it seems like feature branches are the order of the day at the new gig (and doing it all through IntelliJ makes me feel like a charlatan). It seems pretty damn good too, although there was a rather obnoxious amount of typing involved such as
git flow feature start foo-feature just to get working on a new feature. I suspected some command line completion magick was available and
indeed it is.
Here's when things got weird, although I had no clue this was related to
--color=always at this point. It seemed as though, suddenly, my git command completion was hosed, big time. One or two things worked, but much did not. Typing
git following by some double-tab action to show possible completions revealed the reason why:
jarcher-mbp15r:bash $ git
Display all 106 possibilities? (y or n)
^[[01;31m^[[K flow
a^[[m^[[Kdd g^[[m^[[Kc
a^[[m^[[Km g^[[m^[[Ket-tar-commit-id
a^[[m^[[Knnotate g^[[m^[[Krep
a^[[m^[[Kpply g^[[m^[[Kui
a^[[m^[[Krchimport h^[[m^[[Kash-object
etc...
Yup, almost all the subcommands were funky like this. No wonder I couldn't choose between
checkout and
cherry-pick. Neither of them began with
ch anymore...
Believing git flow completion to be the culprit, I googled along those lines. Luckily I turned up one (and only one!)
page of interest, where somebody else reported the same symptoms, and a day later that they'd determined the following line in their bash configuration was the culprit:
alias egrep='egrep --color=always'
Alarm bells rang. I remembered that I'd recently set things up so my grep command would be invoked with
--color=always; I even had this vague recollection that I'd read
always meant that when the output was piped to another command the color-inducing control characters would be passed along too. By contrast,
auto would only include those color control characters when the results of grepping were destined for immediate output on screen.
I unset my
GREP_OPTIONS variable et voila, suddenly it all worked as it should. A quick look at the git completion script confirmed that grep is used in there, explaining to my satisfaction why --color=always was screwing things up.
Since this was such an evil little trap I thought it was worth blogging about. Maybe it'll save somebody else from suffering this confusing problem.
