posted 15 years ago
They're used automatically. If you want to override them, you set your own value for the environment variable of interest, grep reads that value and uses it.
The secret of how to be miserable is to constantly expect things are going to happen the way that they are "supposed" to happen.
You can have faith, which carries the understanding that you may be disappointed. Then there's being a willfully-blind idiot, which virtually guarantees it.