Comment 4 for bug 381282

Good point: a no-output-on-no-matches flag would solve this, and I'd shut up :-).

Re 'grep foo bar': that's an assertion that bar exists, but not an assertion that foo exists. When you search for something, it is interesting if the place you're searching for it doesn't exist (!), but not so interesting if the thing you're searching for in that place doesn't exist (after all, it could just be somewhere else, or not exist at all). In the current discussion, 'grep foo bar' when bar does not exist is equivalent to doing a 'bzr search' before the index has been built, or when the current working directory is not a bzr-controlled tree at all.