This is no good:
PATH: /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194/bin:\
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194@global/bin:\
/usr/local/rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p194/bin:\
/usr/local/rvm/bin:\
/usr/local/sbin:\
/usr/local/bin:\
/usr/sbin:\
/usr/bin:\
/sbin:\
/bin
I am willing to bet that in at least a few of those directories you had $PATHed ahead of /bin and /sbin - especially the ruby ones - you had common shell app wrappers scripts for colorizing output. Maybe you even had similar configuration applied in /etc/skel in which case not even /bin/env -i grep could have saved you from yourself.
This is why people compile in chroot.
P.S. I'm only so critical because I had to learn the same lesson the same way a couple years back. You probably would not have needed the =never if your $PATH was clean. Also, you can just use --color in which case the terminal escapes are only used if grep's stdout is a terminal - in other words - not in a gcc |pipe.