Re: grep -v exit code on empty files

[Alexandre Duret-Lutz]

On Thu, Jul 29, 2004 at 12:13:45PM +0100, David Jones wrote:
> The man page for grep claims:
>
> >Normally, exit status is 0 if matches were found, and 1 if  no  matches
> >were  found.   (The  -v  option  inverts the sense of the exit status.)

This wording was fixed in grep 2.5.  -v inverts the sense of matching,
not that of the exit status.

When the input file is empty, searching for lines that contains e or
for lines that do not contains e always fails, hence the exit code.