Problem with grep

Dear gnu.org

I have never written to an organization of this sort before, but I have run into a problem with grep that I cannot find a reasonable answer for no matter how hard I read the man page or google. My grep version is grep (GNU grep) 2.5.1-FreeBSD and I have many grep lines in my bash shell script but here is a typical one:

grep -m 1 "FAILED.*Hardware inventory tool" "$D/output_log"|wc -l|tr -d '\n' >> arrayfile

I repeatedly get the following error when I run the script;

"grep: Invalid max count"

I have tried several small programs as experiments but can't reproduce the problem that way. I did notice that the file "output_log" contains '-A' in it and thought that was causing the problem, but my small programs don't cause the above error.

So, my question - Is this a bug or expected behavior?

Thanks much,

Eric Berlin