henry (12/17/82)
The grep(1) manual page is misleadingly worded when one considers the effects of -v. Things like the description of the exit status are phrased in terms of when lines "match"; the -v option actually inverts the meaning of this completely, but its description does not say so. For example, in the presence of -v, exit status is 0 if at least one line did *not* match the pattern. This behavior is clearly correct, and the manual page should be fixed to describe it accurately. The simplest thing to do is to reword the description of -v to something like this: Invert the sense of matching; ``match'' all lines which do \fInot\fR match the pattern.