Ubuntu service management

Running 'service --status-all' gives the following output:

 [ - ]  apparmor

 [ ? ]  apport

 [ + ]  apt-cacher-ng

 [ ? ]  atd

 [ + ]  bind9

(snipped)

Who on earth thought it was a good idea for the status characters to be symbols that have special meaning when they appear in a regex?  It makes doing 'service --status-all | grep ...' less trivial than it should be.