Re: grep should have option to skip FIFOs

[Stephane Chazelas]

On Thu, Jan 13, 2005 at 11:05:57AM +0100, Stepan Kasal wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 12, 2005 at 02:19:19PM -0600, Gerd Knops wrote:
> > When using 'grep -r', grep 'hangs' when encountering a FIFO. Grep 
> > should probably skip those, or at least offer and option to skip them.
> 
> Indeed, the option -D --devices is designed for this.  Yet the
> implementation had a bug, which is has been fixed in current CVS version.
> 
> You can always use something like this:
> 
> find . -type f | xargs -r grep -H pattern
> 
> This way is much more flexible than the grep -r shortcut.
[...]

But bogus. find default output format (nl delimited list) is not
suitable for xargs input format (blank delimited list where
single double quotes and backslashes are used to escape the
delimiters).

As "-r" is GNU/BSD xargs specific, you might as well use -0:

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -r0 grep -H pattern

(note that the above skips symlinks to regular files).

-- 
Stéphane