broken grep

[Joe Corneli]

Hi, when I run grep like this:

(defun grope (string)
  (interactive "MRegex: ")
  (grep (concat "grep -n -i -e \"" string "\" " (concat apm:dir "a*.tex
  ") (concat apm:dir "b*.tex ") (concat apm:dir "t*.tex ")
(concat apm:dir "m*.tex ")))
  (switch-to-buffer "*grep*"))

I get

cd ~/apm/
grep -n -i -e "int" /Users/joe/apm/a*.tex /Users/joe/apm/b*.tex
/Users/joe/apm/t*.tex /Users/joe/apm/m*.tex  /dev/null

grep exited abnormally with code 2 at Sun Sep 21 20:39:50


Similarly if I just run grep through M-x grep

But if I copy and paste the grep string above to an rxvt,
it runs no problem.  Also it ran no problem in Emacs
until today.  Any idea what is causing the trouble?
Too many files in the directory maybe??  Causing some
kind of depth variable in Emacs to overload?

Joe