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Date:      Wed, 31 May 2000 10:06:49 +0200
From:      Sheldon Hearn <sheldonh@uunet.co.za>
To:        Ruslan Ermilov <ru@FreeBSD.org>
Cc:        "David O'Brien" <obrien@FreeBSD.org>, cvs-committers@FreeBSD.org, cvs-all@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: cvs commit: src/gnu/usr.bin/grep grep.c 
Message-ID:  <82516.959760409@axl.ops.uunet.co.za>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 31 May 2000 10:55:53 %2B0300." <20000531105553.B42042@sunbay.com> 

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On Wed, 31 May 2000 10:55:53 +0300, Ruslan Ermilov wrote:

> The -R option was provided solely for backwards compatibility, so it
> was explicitly left undocumented (see attached).  I am in a position
> to wait for the next official release, and just merge an updated man
> page from there.

It's a pity this whole thing wasn't handled in a more traditional way:
document both -r and -R but mentioon that -R is provided for backward
compatibility and may disappear in future.

Of course, tradition dictates that UNIX tools do only one job, and the
job of recursing through collections of files is not best handled by
multiple utilities like grep.

Not to mention that neither POSIX nor SUSv2 mandate recursion options,
so I guess the GNU folks can do what they want with these things.  Shell
programmers concerned with portability shouldn't be relying on these
options in any case.

Ciao,
Sheldon.


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