CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxshellgrepfreebsd
mstruebing
mstruebing

Reputation: 1812

GNU grep on FreeBSD not working properly

I have a weird problem on FreeBSD 8.4-STABLE with grep (GNU grep) 2.5.1-FreeBSD.

If I try to grep -Hnr searchstring I didn't get any output, but grep is running said ps aux and is keep running until I kill the process.

If I copy a testfile in an empty directory and do

cat testfile | grep searchstring it is working.

But if I try to grep -Hnr searchstring in that directory I also get no output, grep keeps running and running but didn't produce any matches.

Anybody knows how to solve this?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 353

Answers (2)

Keith Thompson
Keith Thompson

Reputation: 263387

Though it doesn't seem to be documented, if you invoke grep with the -r option and no file or directory name arguments, it defaults to the current directory, almost as if you had typed grep -R pattern . except that ./ does not appear in the output.

Apparently this is a fairly new feature.

If you do a recursive grep in a directory with a lot of contents, it could simply take a long time -- perhaps forever if there are device files such as /dev/zero that can produce infinite output.

Upvotes: 1

glenn jackman
glenn jackman

Reputation: 246992

Even though you gave -r, you still have to give grep a file argument. Othersize, as you've discovered, it just sits there waiting for input on stdin.

You want

grep -Hnr searchstring .
# ....................^^

That will recursively find files under the current directory.

Upvotes: 4

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