slight problem with grep.

Jeffrey Smith jxs7451 at ritcv.UUCP
Fri Jan 31 09:55:52 AEST 1986


Just wanted to mention a slight problem with the UNIX grep command.
What happens actually makes sence, but it does tend to be annoying
if you are caught by it.

Anyway, say you are in a directory that contains some Pascal source
code.  Now this is what happened to me.  I wanted to find all of the
write statements in my programs that i had used for debugging.
What happened is a used grep like this to find all of them.

	grep write * > zzzz

having zzzz being a random file.  I used at to run this in the batchmode
and i came back and got a quota exceeded message.  What happens is
grep searches for write in zzzz after it has already written all of
the previouly founded writes to this file.  Needless to say that this
is not a good situation.

Jeffrey Smith    JMS7451 at RITVAXC.BITNET
	         jxs7451!ritcv



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