[ralph]

My normal way of running grep is ~/bin/g.

    #! /bin/sh

    exec egrep --color "$@"

(Not a bash, my shell, alias because they're unavailable in many contexts.)

egrep is AKA grep -e. I don't use GREP_OPTIONS because it pollutes those that don't expect it, as you pointed out.

At the top of a particular source tree I may have a ./g that knows more about what's interesting.

    #! /bin/bash

    find \( -name .svn -o -name tags \) -prune -o -type f -exec egrep "$@" {} +

It checks -name before -type because the latter needs a stat(2).

For other things I do ad hoc queries using grep, find, xargs, etc.