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:
https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?func=detailitem&item_id=8278