Re: grep -R hangs when issued upon certain directory

[Elmar Stellnberger]

Bob Proulx schrieb:
> Elmar Stellnberger wrote:
>>   I am not sure what grep does not like about my home directory, but as
>> soon as I issue a "grep -R Testtext *" in my home dir grep will start to
>> hang not triggering any further disk access after a short while.
> 
> Bugs in grep should be reported to bug-grep.  But you have contacted
> the bug-coreutils list instead.  We don't know much about grep here.
> The bug reporting address for most programs is documented in the
> manual and in the output from --help.
> 
>> Tried to get a backtrace by installing coreutils-debuginfo and
>> coreutils-debugsource but gdb does not find any symbols:
>>> rpm -ql coreutils-debugsource coreutils-debuginfo|grep grep
>>> (nothing found)
> 
> I am not familiar with those packages.  I assume that they are
> specific to a particular distribution.  Meanwhile this is the mailing
> list for the development of the coreutils for the GNU project.  Those
> packages are not part of the GNU Project.
> 
> But I don't think they are related to grep.  This was confirmed by
> your not finding any files relating to grep in them.  They are
> unrelated to your issue with grep.
> 
>> i.e. it does not seem to descend to subdirs)
> 
> Even though this isn't the right place to comment I can't help but to
> suggest something.  The most likely problem is that you have a pipe
> file in your home directory.  When grep reads the file it is blocked
> waiting for input.  Since nothing is writing the file this input never
> arrives and grep waits for it.  You would need to --exclude that file.
> 
> The grep -R option is really just a hack.  Adding it requires adding
> much of 'find's functionality such as --exclude and others.  It
> violates the principles of the Unix philosophy.  Instead it is better
> to use 'find' for finding files to act upon with a command.  Here is a
> better way to search all files in your home directory.
> 
>   find . -type f -exec grep Testtext {} +
> 
> Bob
> 

thx, that has resolved my issue.