Re: [bug-grep] Re: Grep for Windows bug report

[Aharon Robbins]

Bourne style shells under Unix don't do this.  Maybe Windows, but
not Unix.  E.g.,

        $ cd /tmp
        $ mkdir x
        $ cd x
        $ touch a b
        $ ls * > c
        $ cat c
        a
        b

Arnold

> Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2005 14:01:22 +0000
> From: Julian Foad <address@hidden>
> Subject: [bug-grep] Re: Grep for Windows bug report
> To: "El-Shamaa, Khaled (ICARDA)" <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden
>
>
> El-Shamaa, Khaled (ICARDA) wrote:
> > At first I would like to thanks you for your effort in making great grep
> > tool available in windows OS, but while I use it I faced a bug I want to
> > report it:
>
> Thanks for the praise.
>
> Grep now has its own mailing list <address@hidden> so I am copying this reply 
> there.
>
> > When I try to save grep output command into file I fail in the endless
> > loop, I used a command like this (I use it to grep postnuke modules
> > information in one click):
> > 
> > grep -R -E "modversion.'(name'|version'|contact')" * > modules.txt
>
> I think the problem you have is not a bug in Grep.  You asked Grep to find 
> text 
> in all the files in the current directory, while asking the operating system 
> to 
> put the result into a file called "modules.txt" in the current directory.  
> The 
> way the operating system works is it creates "modules.txt" as an empty file 
> in 
> the current directory before it runs "grep", and therefore Grep searches in 
> that file as well as the other files.  Each time it finds a matching line in 
> any file including modules.txt, a copy of the matching line gets added to the 
> end of modules.txt, and so the result is an endless loop as modules.txt grows 
> until the disk is full.
>
> As for solutions ... you could use Grep's "--exclude=modules.txt" option, or 
> you could write the result to a a file in a different directory.
>
> I hope this helps.
>
> - Julian