ps aux |grep 'asdf' grep: asdf: No such file or directory

Question

For some reason a while back, the behavior of my command line changed, and I don't know why. Using OSX, now Mountain Lion(although this behavior was present before the switch).

Using standard terminal, I would expect back some results from ps, but I get an error:

$ ps aux |grep 'asdf'
grep: asdf: No such file or director

This also shows up, for example, here:

ln -s "/Applications/Sublime Text 2.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl" ~/bin/subl
ln: /Users/peter/bin/subl: No such file or directory

Answer 1

1. Does it happens when you login as another user?
2. Check and output of "set ; env; alias". Post it you can't find a problem.

Answer 2

You have something that's adding a bad option under the hood (or more precisely, something that isn't an option). It could be an alias for grep (or more rarely, a function or wrapper script), or the GREP_OPTIONS environment variable. Run the following commands:

type grep
echo "$GREP_OPTIONS"

If grep is a wrapper script, fix that. If grep is an alias or function, fix it; it's probably defined in ~/.profile, ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bashrc or /etc/profile. Same thing if GREP_OPTIONS is the culprit.