---
id: "bug-1606"
status: "fixed"
status_updated: "2026-09-24"
status_note: ""
component: "build"
severity: "unknown"
timestamp: "2026-08-20T16:00:00Z"
last_seen: "2026-09-19T09:00:00Z"
occurrences: 1
files: ["src/tools/test-version-startup-consistency.sh"]
tags: ["bash", "grep", "busybox", "sandbox", "portability", "sed", "build-time-versioning"]
related: []
legacy: true
---

# bug-1606: grep: invalid option -- 'P' (BusyBox usage dump) when a standalone .sh script (run via `bash…

## Description
grep: invalid option -- 'P' (BusyBox usage dump) when a standalone .sh script (run via `bash script.sh`, not typed as an inline Bash-tool command) calls `grep -oP '...\K...'`

## Environment
_Not recorded (migrated from buglog.json)._

## Reproduction
_Not recorded (migrated from buglog.json)._

## Root cause
This coding-agent harness's interactive shell shadows plain `grep` with a `.bashrc`-sourced shell FUNCTION that shells out to a PCRE-capable (ugrep-backed) binary -- but that function is interactive-shell-only and is NOT inherited by a script invoked as `bash script.sh` (a separate, non-interactive process), which falls back to the real `grep` on PATH: BusyBox in this environment, with no -P/PCRE support at all. `grep -oP '(?<=x)y'` typed directly as a Bash-tool command therefore worked fine, masking the incompatibility until the same call was placed inside a committed script file and run standalone.

## Fix
Replaced the grep -oP '"gitCommit":\s*"\K[^"]*' style extraction with POSIX BRE `sed -n 's/.*"gitCommit":[[:space:]]*"\([^"]*\)".*/\1/p'`, which BusyBox sed supports. General rule: any shell script meant to be run standalone (not just typed inline) must assume POSIX-only grep/sed (BRE, -E, -F, -o) -- no -P/PCRE, no lookbehind/\K.

## Verification
_Not recorded (migrated from buglog.json)._

## References
_Not recorded (migrated from buglog.json)._