recursive grep

[Leslie Mikesell]

In article <2390 at auspex.auspex.com> guy at auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris) writes:

> >I wouldn't complain about xargs not being capable of handling
> >filenames with spaces and newlines.  There are a lot of other
> >programs that will break under the same circumstances.

>In which case I'd not only continue to complain about "xargs", but
>complain about those other programs as well....

Well, how would you go about parsing filenames out of a list if you
can't use spaces or newlines as the delimiters?

Personally, I think it is a mistake to allow control characters or
shell metacharacters to be in filenames.  Actually, I'd say that
it's a mistake to use any characters that could be be in filenames
as shell metacharacters, but given the selection available I guess
the shell is not really at fault.

We've been through this before and I doubt that anyone has changed
their mind, but I'll bet no one wants to have a file named ";rm *"
in their directories waiting for a shell script to eval it or a
program to insert it into a system() call.

Les Mikesell