Emulating old -r functionality.

[David Wilson]

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