Re: Grep man page: --line-buffering vs. --line-buffered

[Stepan Kasal]

Hallo,

On Wed, May 28, 2003 at 01:42:38PM +0300, Jori Mantysalo wrote:
> > I am not the grep maintainer, so you should send this to the list.

I'm not the maintainer either, officially.
But I'm interested in grep and will take care to push the patch to the
official maintainer.  (Perhaps I'll even become the official maintainer.)

I think you are right with the typos.  I'll look at it soon.

> And last: What this default means?
> 
>  `--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 tried "grep --directories=read "." somefile somedirectory" and I just
> get contents of "somefile", not anything from "somedirectory". I am using
> Linux, kernel 2.4.20, ext3 FS. Maybe man page could be clearer.

In traditional UNIX, directory was very similar to a text file, containing
inode number and name of the files on separate lines.

So ``grep foo dirname'' was very similar to ``ls dirname| grep foo''.

On modern systems, it's not possible to read directories as if they were
text files.

That's what's the help speaks about.  I realize that it might be confusing
to people who have not studied the UNIX tradition.

Would you be so kind to suggest a text which would be more comprehensive?

Thank you in advance for any help,
        Stepan Kasal