bug#16444: bug #16444: grep -r fails with "Bad file descriptor" for mingw-w64

[Paul Eggert]

Norihiro Tanaka wrote:
> MinGW always returns ST_INO = 0, which is POSIX incompatible.

Yes, this is a known deficiency in MinGW that is documented in Gnulib, here:

http://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/html_node/sys_002fstat_002eh.html

(search for "st_ino").

When we discovered this deficiency years ago, we decided that it'd be too much 
of a pain to work around it then.  Please see the thread starting here:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2009-09/msg00252.html

in which a patch was installed that tries to work around some of the MinGW 
deficiency; unfortunately the patch broke a lot of things and was backed out. 
I'm not optimistic about a fix this time either.

The deficiency should be fixed in MinGW, so that functions like 'stat' behave as 
programs expect.  In the meantime, I suggest not using recursive grep in MinGW.