Re: [address@hidden: Grep --directories option]

[Robert Millan]

hi!

From: Stepan Kasal <kasal@math.cas.cz>:
> 
> I'd like to ask you how should grep behave if it encounters a directory
> as an argument on the command line.
> [...]
> The behaviour is controlled by the --directories option.
> There are three possible values:
> 
> read: try to read the directory as if it was regular file.
> [...]
> skip: silently ignore directory parameters
> recurse: recurse through them, equivalent to -r or --recurse.
> [...]
> 
> Well, I'd like to change the default to ``skip'' now.
> We don't have to follow the Unix tradition that closely; after all GNU
> is not Unix ;-)

you're asking to remove a feature that works on GNU, in order to avoid
an error message for other systems.

please see what the GNU Coding Standards (sec 5.5) say about this:

"The primary purpose of GNU software is to run on top of the GNU kernel,
compiled with the GNU C compiler, on various types of CPU."

portability is always nice, but it's silly for the GNU project, which is
the project to develop an operating system, to optimise its own tools for
other systems (even though variants of GNU, like GNU/Linux or GNU/FreeBSD)
at the cost of losing features for GNU itself.

-- 
Robert Millan