Re: grep problem

[Bob Proulx]

Stepan Kasal <address@hidden> [2002-09-17 14:16:39 +0200]:
> On Fri, Sep 13, 2002 at 09:16:48PM +1000, Dave Davey wrote:
> > ... problem really is that it will stray into /dev if asked ...
> 
>       I don't think grep should really care about this.
> I'd say that some combination of find & grep could solve the problem.

I agree.  I assume you were 'root' at the time that you hung your
system?  A non-root user should _not_ be able to hang the system. (But
that would be determined by the file permissions on the devices in
/dev/* which would prevent that.)  But gosh it is hard to protect the
system from the superuser.  And you really don't want to do so.  The
superuser does have the ability to do bad things and to crash the
system.  It needs that in order to be able to do good things to the
system.

If anything the fix would be to remove the -r option from grep.  That
is the option that caused this trouble.  Until just this moment I did
not even know GNU grep had a recurse option.  It does not need it and
was never traditionally provided with commands.  Using 'find' is a
better option and works the same way with all of the commands.

Bob