That's a valid concern, but in this case it won't cause problems -- grep exits w...

dylan604 · on July 9, 2021

except, your grep -v portion will always return a result so $? will also always return 0. even if your grep banana did not find anything.

the reversing the greps will be my new default behavior

hddqsb · on July 10, 2021

Nope, try it out:

  $ printf 'banana\ngrep banana\n' | grep banana | grep -v grep
  banana
  $ echo $?
  0
  $ printf 'grep banana\n' | grep banana | grep -v grep
  $ echo $?
  1

To clarify my previous comment, `grep -v grep` exits with 0 if there was a line without "grep" in the output of `grep banana`.