in looking over the posts in this thread, i now think that my arguments don't make much sense as written. i had a justifiable reason for making this proposal, or thought i did, but, perhaps partly because i am tired and partly because my upgrade to xorg makes the screen nearly unreadable, i don't know what it was. it had to do with preprocessing, but i now don't recognize how my proposal fixes anything. i apologize to all parties for wasting bandwidth.
in case it matters, i am on the side of the developers who want to keep grep clean and let find do the dirty work. perhaps the man page can elaborate for those who request fanciness. however, imho if there is to be a grep -r, it needs to not recurse symlinked dirs by default. and i like the idea of grep improvements like allowing you to specify that there be no colon after the filename (--label does not imply that). -- Webmaster: do you believe that people will (a) switch browsers to view your "best viewed with" page or (b) go to your competitor?
