Re: grep . /; echo $?

[Julian Foad]

Charles Levert wrote:
> According to the grep(1p) POSIX "man page":
[...]
> This does not restrict GNU grep from being more
> informative about what happened by documenting
> and using many exit statuses that are greater
> than 1 (e.g., open() error vs. read() error),

Sure, but that's not relevant to this thread as far as I can see.  This thread 
is about whether to exit with an error, not about how detailed any such error 
should be.

> > > `--directories=ACTION'
> > >    If an input file is a directory, use ACTION to process it.  By
> > >    default, ACTION is `read', which means that directories are read
> > >    just as if they were ordinary files (some operating systems and
> > >    filesystems disallow this, and will cause `grep' to print error
> > >    messages for every directory or silently skip them).
> >
> > I don't know: it all seems a bit arbitrary and inconsistent.  What's the
> > point of defaulting to ACTION="read" on systems that don't support it?
>
> Consistency (for grep) across OSes.  If OSes
> are inconsistent, that is another issue; grep
> should merely use its exit status to document
> what actually happened at a lower level on the
> OS on which it happens to be running.

So let me be clear.  You disagree with the current behaviour of silently 
skipping unreadable directories on some systems.  The default should remain 
"directories=read", and Grep should (on all systems) report an error if it 
can't read a directory that it has been told to search in, and we should remove 
the words "or silently skip them" from the "info" quote above.  Yes?

That is fine with me.  I would call this "removing unnecessary complexity".  I 
have a niggling feeling that somebody made a conscious effort to make it behave 
the way it does; but that's the way of things: if a special case was introduced 
for some reason but the reason wasn't documented, we can't be expected to 
preserve it indefinitely.

- Julian