On 2025-01-16 15:32, Jim Meyering wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 15, 2025 at 8:16 PM sur-behoffski
> <sur-behoff...@grouse.com.au> wrote:
> [...]>
> Thanks for the suggestions. I went with Paul's (keeping it concise is
> important), so --help now prints this:
>
> When FILE is '-', read standard input. If no FILE is given, read standard
> input, but with -r, recursively search the working directory instead. With
> fewer than two FILEs, assume -h. Exit status is 0 if any line is selected,
> 1 otherwise; if any error occurs and -q is not given, the exit status is 2.
>
> Here's the commit:
> https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/grep.git/commit/?id=v3.11-56-gfc6aba9
>
> Marking this as done.
----------------------------
Blending in documentation about -h immediately made me curious.
I've tried a quick test, and it seems grep 3.11's behaviour
doesn't match the new documentation:
~ $ mkdir grep-r
~ $ cd !$
cd grep-r
~/grep-r $ echo "Hello, world" >single.txt
~/grep-r $ grep -r llo
single.txt:Hello, world
~/grep-r $ ls -al
total 12
drwxr-xr-x 2 bjh bjh 4096 Jan 17 13:30 .
drwx--x--x 38 bjh bjh 4096 Jan 17 13:30 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 bjh bjh 13 Jan 17 13:30 single.txt
~/grep-r $ grep --version
grep (GNU grep) 3.11
Copyright (C) 2023 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later
<https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
Written by Mike Haertel and others; see
<https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/grep.git/tree/AUTHORS>.
grep -P uses PCRE2 10.44 2024-06-07
~/grep-r $
Note the match prefix "single.txt:" above.
----------------------------
Looking at grep's documentation for -h:
-h, --no-filename
Suppress the prefixing of file names on output. This is the
default when there is
only one file (or only standard input) to search.
----------------------------
The discrepancy arises because recursion might dig up only
a single file to search, yet the assumption is that if -r is
specified (use recursion), simply assume many files, i.e.:
-H, --with-filename
Print the file name for each match. This is the default when
there is more than one
file to search. This is a GNU extension.
I believe the behaviour is reasonable, as grep doesn't want
to get deeply into file counting associated with recursion,
but the behaviour mismatches the new documentation.
Reading the above a bit more, there may be confusion in the
documentation between "one file" and "one FILE" in the -h
entry. Also, an additional "-r implies -H" clause might be
worthwhile in e.g. the -r documentation.
----------------------------
Hope this helps,
s-b
