Re: grep 2.4.2 -r option broken

[Bob Proulx]

> "King, Steven R" <address@hidden> wrote:
> > grep -r "struct timeval" *.h

Paul wrote an excellent reply.
> Wildcard expansion is performed by the shell; -r is handled by grep,
> but only applies to whatever arguments are given to it by the shell.
> In this case, the shell expands *.h to a list of all header files in
> the current directory, and passes those to grep.  grep would recurse
> on those, since -r was given, but none of them are directories.  This
> will do what you want:
> find . -name '*.h' | xargs grep "struct timeval" /dev/null

You may also find this FAQ entry useful.  It describes this behavior in
some detail.

  
http://www.gnu.org/software/fileutils/doc/faq/core-utils-faq.html#Why%20doesn't%20rm%20-r%20*.pattern%20recurse%20like%20it%20should%3f

Bob