Re: No response from grep

[Seth David Schoen]

Clayton Gillespie writes:

> Problem:  grep does not respond when given a valid command, but produces
> errors for option typos

The default behavior of grep is to search for the requested string in
its input, rather than in a file.  This is useful in using grep as part
of a pipeline in which several commands are strung together; then grep
can be used to find the parts of the output of one command which match
a certain pattern.

When no file is specified, grep follows this default behavior.  It's
not unresponsive -- it's just waiting for you to type in input which
it will then search for the pattern you specified.

If you say

fgrep -e Context testfilename

you should see the output you were expecting.

An example that shows grep searching its input would be

seq 1 20 | grep '[02468]$'

to select only the even numbers from the output of the seq command.

-- 
Seth David Schoen <address@hidden>      |  No haiku patents
     http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/        |  means I've no incentive to
  FD9A6AA28193A9F03D4BF4ADC11B36DC9C7DD150  |        -- Don Marti