On Thu, 4 Dec 2008, ONYTZ wrote:
I wonder if this is enough to assume that grep has trouble with too many arguments read in from a file?
More likely your patterns aren't all different, so when you split them up some match twice, whereas if you supply redundant patterns to a single invocation of grep they only match once:
$ echo the | grep the the $ echo the | grep -e the -e the the
