[bug-grep] Re: Grep for Windows bug report

[Julian Foad]

El-Shamaa, Khaled (ICARDA) wrote:
> At first I would like to thanks you for your effort in making great grep
> tool available in windows OS, but while I use it I faced a bug I want to
> report it:

Thanks for the praise.

Grep now has its own mailing list <address@hidden> so I am copying this reply 
there.

> When I try to save grep output command into file I fail in the endless
> loop, I used a command like this (I use it to grep postnuke modules
> information in one click):
>
> grep -R -E "modversion.'(name'|version'|contact')" * > modules.txt

I think the problem you have is not a bug in Grep.  You asked Grep to find text 
in all the files in the current directory, while asking the operating system to 
put the result into a file called "modules.txt" in the current directory.  The 
way the operating system works is it creates "modules.txt" as an empty file in 
the current directory before it runs "grep", and therefore Grep searches in 
that file as well as the other files.  Each time it finds a matching line in 
any file including modules.txt, a copy of the matching line gets added to the 
end of modules.txt, and so the result is an endless loop as modules.txt grows 
until the disk is full.

As for solutions ... you could use Grep's "--exclude=modules.txt" option, or 
you could write the result to a a file in a different directory.

I hope this helps.

- Julian