[RndTbl] *reading* a file causes reboot

[Gilbert E. Detillieux]

On 04/05/2015 10:59 PM, Adam Thompson wrote:
> I've found "find / -xdev -type f -print0 | xargs grep string /dev/null"
> to be completely reliable and reasonably portable. Not to mention a lot
> faster. Faster yet if you use any of the #NN arguments to xargs to batch
> the grep invocations.

I'd also use the xargs -r (or --no-run-if-empty) option, to avoid 
running the command if there are no args.  (It may not particularly 
matter in this case, but it can sometimes be quite significant.)

> I started doing that because every time I ran grep -r, it would just
> hang somewhere in /etc.

Yeah, that's been my experience as well...

> On May 4, 2015 10:51:08 PM CDT, Trevor Cordes <trevor at tecnopolis.ca> wrote:
...
>     Or... I just RTFM and it looks like gnu grep solved the symlink problem
>     already:
>
>             -r, --recursive
>                    Read  all  files  under  each  directory,  recursively,
>     following  symbolic links only if they are on the command line.  Note
>             that if no file operand is given, grep
>                    searches the working directory.  This is equivalent to
>     the -d recurse option.
>
>             -R, --dereference-recursive
>                    Read all files under each directory, recursively.  Follow
>                    all sy!
>       mbolic
>     links, unlike -r.
>
>     So that explains why I've never hit a symlink loop: I've never used -R
>     (capital).

This if a more recent addition to GNU grep.  E.g. on RHEL 6 systems, -R 
and -r are the same, and the man page makes no mention of special 
handling of symlinks.  (Hence the possibility of loops and hanging.)

-- 
Gilbert E. Detillieux		E-mail: <gedetil at muug.mb.ca>
Manitoba UNIX User Group	Web:	http://www.muug.mb.ca/
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