There have been various reports over time that recursive grep is not working on Win9x. For every directory you get a 'Permission denied' error. Also there have been reports that using open(2) to open a directory readonly on Win9x fails. Both have the same cause.
open(2) calls _open in the cygwin1.dll (See source file syscalls.cc). When you open a file (or directory) it creates a file_handler and calls fhandler_base::open (See source file fhandler.cc). fhandler_base::open adds the FILE_FLAG_BACKUP_SEMANTICS to the file_attributes for the Win32 CreateFile call in case you open a directory. This way of opening a directory is only supported on WinNT and not on Win9x. See MSDN. Hence the reports that grep -R works on NT and not on 9x. To get grep to work on 9x, the fix is simple: get fhandler_base::open to set the error EISDIR when you try to open a directory. This is *not* strictly POSIX. According to POSIX open should only return EISDIR when you try to open a directory read/write or writeonly. However it fixes the problem for grep. The patch is simple. It makes use of the wincap.can_open_directories() capability, which seems to be foreseen for exactly this type of problems. However I could not find an other place where this capability is used in the cygwin.dll. Patch attached: fhandler.diff
fhandler.diff
Description: application/unknown-content-type-diff_auto_file
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