GNU grep 2.12 changes behavior of recursion options, breaks existing scripts

Re:GNU grep 2.12 changes behavior of recursion options, brea... by js2 on Thursday July 26, 2012 @09:35AM (#4295862)

Here's the change and it's justification:

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/grep.git/commit/?id=c6e3ea6...

Change -r to follow only command-line symlinks, and by default to read only devices named on the command line. This is a simple way to get a more-useful behavior when searching random directories; the idea is to use 'find' if you want something fancy. -R acts as before and gets a new alias --dereference-recursive.

Personally I think breaking compatibility for this change was a poor decision.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:GNU grep 2.12 changes behavior of recursion options, brea... by akkartik on Thursday July 26, 2012 @11:05AM (#4296307)

That link doesn't work. I thought at first that it was incorrectly copied, but you can see it here:

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/grep.git/log/?qt=grep&q...

And clicking on it says 'No repositories found'. Anybody else have this problem?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:GNU grep 2.12 changes behavior of recursion options, brea... by js2 on Thursday July 26, 2012 @11:40AM (#4296544)

Alternate link:

http://repo.or.cz/w/grep.git/commit/c6e3ea61d9f08aa0128a0eb1...

(Yea for the "D" in DVCS.)

Also, the corresponding bug which has additional discussion:

http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?17623

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:GNU grep 2.12 changes behavior of recursion options, brea... by Ralith on Thursday July 26, 2012 @01:26PM (#4297326)

Just FYI, "Yea" and "Yay" are not synonymous.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:GNU grep 2.12 changes behavior of recursion options, brea... by js2 on Thursday July 26, 2012 @02:39PM (#4297833)

Doh. I see I mistyped "its" up above as well. (Or maybe iOS did that for me.)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:GNU grep 2.12 changes behavior of recursion options, brea... by cschramm on Thursday July 26, 2012 @11:20AM (#4296410)

Yes, seems like Savannah can't completely handle HN ;)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:GNU grep 2.12 changes behavior of recursion options, brea... by akkartik on Thursday July 26, 2012 @12:18PM (#4296778)

The error message doesn't suggest this is a load issue. Also, wouldn't the entire app go down rather than a single link?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:GNU grep 2.12 changes behavior of recursion options, brea... by cschramm on Thursday July 26, 2012 @02:15PM (#4297662)

If it's not a load issue and neither some intended limitation to prevent load issues, somebody pulled it on purpose. ...which I actually included in not being able to handle HN. ;)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:GNU grep 2.12 changes behavior of recursion options, brea... by cschramm on Friday July 27, 2012 @12:03AM (#4299963)

The commit details are back now. :)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:GNU grep 2.12 changes behavior of recursion options, brea... by morsch on Thursday July 26, 2012 @03:47PM (#4298212)

the idea is to use 'find' if you want something fancy

I don't get it, can someone explain? It also appears in the ML thread linked elsewhere, and I don't understand it there either. (I understand the reasons for the change in behaviour, just not this specific line.)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:GNU grep 2.12 changes behavior of recursion options, brea... by bluetech on Thursday July 26, 2012 @07:29PM (#4299246)

find is essentially the command line tool for traversing the file system hierarchy recursively. It's got a million options, e.g. whether to follow symlinks, depth, file/directory/device/.., user, group, change time and many more. When you use grep -r, it only does the most common thing which is to just go over all the files. If you want something more "fancy", you can use find, e.g.:

  $ find -name '*.c' -type f -exec grep printf '{}' +

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:GNU grep 2.12 changes behavior of recursion options, brea... by a3_nm on Thursday July 26, 2012 @02:42PM (#4297848)

Relevant thread on the ML:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-grep/2012-03/msg00028...

[ Parent | on HN ]