Hi Jim,
         After following your comment, the error (I am not sure now if I could call it an error) has gone. So you were right, it was due to the way I was handling positional parameters in my .profile file.

Sol: changing from    

grep () 

{ 

    /usr/bin/grep --color=auto $*

}


to 

grep () 

{ 

    /usr/bin/grep --color=auto "$@"

}

solved it. (Not sure ';' is required here )

-Bibek

On Tue, Jul 26, 2016 at 10:07 AM, Jim Meyering <jim@meyering.net> wrote:
On Tue, Jul 26, 2016 at 7:46 AM, bibek ghimire <gbibek@gmail.com> wrote:
>     /usr/bin/grep --color=auto $*

That function is erroneous due to the use of unquoted $*.
Use this instead, which fixes that, and also works when the executable
grep is not in /usr/bin:

grep() { env grep --color=auto "$@"; }