grep is always recursive

Derek Broughton derek at pointerstop.ca
Sun Jan 25 15:52:37 UTC 2009


Smoot Carl-Mitchell wrote:

> On Sat, 2009-01-24 at 10:42 -0500, Hal Burgiss wrote:
>> Does anyone know of a setting anywhere in Ubuntu (8.04), that would
>> cause grep to *always* behave as if it were run as 'grep -r'? My home
>> system always greps recursively, which is highly annoying. I cannot
>> find an environment setting or system file to explain this, yet
>> grepping something simple in my home dir, as an example, returns a
>> huge list of files, including files in various subdirectories. It
>> makes no difference whatsoever whether grep is invoked as 'grep' or
>> 'grep -r', the behavior is identical. I have other 8.04 systems that
>> don't do this, so its quite curious to me. What I want is equivalent
>> to:
> 
> You do not happen to have a directory called "-r" in your home
> directory.  That would cause the problem you are seeing.

Brilliant!






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