-h prints alias information even for grep

From: Kevin Brodsky <kevin.brodsky@arm.com>
Date: Jul 25, 2025, 08:17 UTC
Message-ID: <1c3a0463-36ee-4a2d-92e0-fac9c0bf77da@arm.com>

Hi,

I've noticed a strange interaction that probably wasn't intended.

The -h flag typically means "help", and if passed to an aliased command an extra line is printed to describe the alias. This also holds for the grep command, if no other argument is passed.

Things get weirder if grep is passed valid arguments, because in that case -h means something else (suppressing filename output). Of course no help message is printed in that case, but the alias information is still printed!

Example:

$ git g -h -A20 alias .gitconfig
'g' is aliased to 'grep'
[alias]
[...]
    g    = grep

----

It seems like that alias information line should be tied to the printing of the help message, rather than the -h flag?

I noticed this behaviour years ago and I still do with the latest version of Git (2.50.1).

Cheers, Kevin