Bug 119035

Summary: grep -r shouldn't open fifos?
Product: [Retired] Red Hat Linux Reporter: Christopher Beland <beland>
Component: grepAssignee: Tim Waugh <twaugh>
Status: CLOSED UPSTREAM QA Contact: Mike McLean <mikem>
Severity: low Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 9CC: mitr
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Hardware: i686   
OS: Linux   
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Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
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Last Closed: 2004-03-24 09:42:41 UTC Type: ---
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description Christopher Beland 2004-03-24 03:39:56 UTC 
From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5)
Gecko/20031017 Galeon/1.3.13

Description of problem:
I wanted to see if a certain string existed in any file on my
computer, so I ran "grep -r" on /home and /usr/ and /var and so on. 
At a certain point, grep hung without explanation.  "strace" reveals
that it is hanging trying to read, for example, /var/lib/gdm/.gdmfifo,
which is a FIFO, not a regular file.

The person who helped me figure this out thought that it was not good
that "grep -r" should try to read FIFOs, as that is not the expected
behavior (at least for us).  So I thought I'd report this as a bug and
let people more clueful than I mull it over.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
grep-2.5.1-7.8

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
"grep -r xxx /var" or any tree with a FIFO in it

Additional info:
Comment 1 Tim Waugh 2004-03-24 09:42:41 UTC 
https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?func=detailitem&item_id=8278