Bug 119035 - grep -r shouldn't open fifos?
Summary: grep -r shouldn't open fifos?
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED UPSTREAM
Alias: None
Product: Red Hat Linux
Classification: Retired
Component: grep
Version: 9
Hardware: i686
OS: Linux
medium
low
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Tim Waugh
QA Contact: Mike McLean
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2004-03-24 03:39 UTC by Christopher Beland
Modified: 2007-04-18 17:04 UTC (History)
1 user (show)

Fixed In Version:
Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2004-03-24 09:42:41 UTC
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)

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:


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