Re: grep : -r (recursive) option does not work when... ( grep (GNU grep) 2.4 )

[Paul Jarc]

Andre Gompel <address@hidden> wrote:
> grep : -r (recursive) option does not work in the follwing context:
> 
> grep -ri   string *.c

That isn't supposed to do what you want.  Try this instead:
find . -name '*.c' | xargs grep -i string

grep -r searches *all* files in the directories you give on the
command line.  It doesn't let you search just the files whose names
match a shell pattern.  You specified *.c.  The shell expanded this to
all names matching this pattern before grep ever saw it.

> Error message: "No such file or directory".

Presumably, there were no such files in your working directory, so the
shell left "*.c" unmodified.  So grep looked for a file or directory
called "*.c", but there was none.


paul