grep is always recursive

[Loïc Grenié]

2009/1/30 Derek Broughton <derek at pointerstop.ca>:
> Loïc Grenié wrote:
>
>> 2009/1/29 Lorenzo Luengo <lluengo at dgeo.udec.cl>:
>>>>
>>> This makes me think of those poor bash script developers that don't know
>>> which filenames they will be handling... I think that a good fix to this
>>> problem could be adding an option like"--files=*", that handles a
>>> regular expression for filtering files.
>>>
>>> Do you think of it to be a good idea?
>>
>>     I do not think so: * is intended to be expanded by the shell.
>>   In that case, you would need the * to be expanded by the
>>   program (probably through libc).
>
> And, in bash at least, it would need to be --files="*" :-)

    Not necessarily. In no file has name that starts with --files=,
  --files=* could be not expanded (depends on the nonomatch
  option or something similar).

         Loïc