Re: grep problem

[Alain Magloire]

> 
> 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.
> 

I'm not the grep maintainer, but '--recursive' was the top request
for enhancement and been in grep since 1998:

1998-08-18  Paul Eggert

        Add support for new -r or --recursive (or -d recurse or
        --directories=recurse) option.


grep-2.5.x has : 
  -D, --devices=ACTION      how to handle devices, FIFOs and sockets
                            ACTION is 'read' or 'skip'

Unfortunately I do not know where the latest version is kept.