Agreed; chmod/chown/ls/cp are all file manipulators.  grep is a filter;
it is a mere convenience that it takes filenames at all.

glimpse is good.  Clever find | xargs is good.  (Fixed xargs using NUL
instead of \n is better.)  recursive grep is bad; when I want to
call grep on object modules which are at least 40-50% of the data in my
tree, I'll do it on purpose, thanks.

Some of us only have wimpy old 30 MIPS machines; we can't afford the processor
time for these frills.  (Yes, I know, tehre are <5 MIPS machines
running NetBSD.  Implement bloat and face their wrath.)

-s