broken grep

broken grep

[Joe Corneli]

Hi, when I run grep like this:

(defun grope (string)
  (interactive "MRegex: ")
  (grep (concat "grep -n -i -e \"" string "\" " (concat apm:dir "a*.tex
  ") (concat apm:dir "b*.tex ") (concat apm:dir "t*.tex ")
(concat apm:dir "m*.tex ")))
  (switch-to-buffer "*grep*"))

I get

cd ~/apm/
grep -n -i -e "int" /Users/joe/apm/a*.tex /Users/joe/apm/b*.tex
/Users/joe/apm/t*.tex /Users/joe/apm/m*.tex  /dev/null

grep exited abnormally with code 2 at Sun Sep 21 20:39:50


Similarly if I just run grep through M-x grep

But if I copy and paste the grep string above to an rxvt,
it runs no problem.  Also it ran no problem in Emacs
until today.  Any idea what is causing the trouble?
Too many files in the directory maybe??  Causing some
kind of depth variable in Emacs to overload?

Joe

Re: broken grep

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Joe Corneli <jcorneli@math.utexas.edu>
> Date: Sun, 21 Sep 2003 20:42:03 -0500
> 
> cd ~/apm/
> grep -n -i -e "int" /Users/joe/apm/a*.tex /Users/joe/apm/b*.tex
> /Users/joe/apm/t*.tex /Users/joe/apm/m*.tex  /dev/null
> 
> grep exited abnormally with code 2 at Sun Sep 21 20:39:50

On what platform does this happen, and with what version of Emacs?
Also, if that's GNU Grep, what does "grep --version" print?

> But if I copy and paste the grep string above to an rxvt,
> it runs no problem.  Also it ran no problem in Emacs
> until today.  Any idea what is causing the trouble?
> Too many files in the directory maybe??  Causing some
> kind of depth variable in Emacs to overload?

Unlikely, on both counts: Emacs doesn't traverse the files itself, it
just invokes the Grep utility with the exact command string it prints
into the *grep* buffer, the one shown above.

The reason is that Grep, indeed, exited with exit status 2.  You need
to find out why did that happen.

What happens if you invoke the same command via "M-!"?