On Wed 19 Mar 2003 13:04:59 +0000(-0500), Matt Price wrote: [...] > if I run emacs -nw, the error doesn't occur, so I asusme the issue is > x-specific. Anyway, though people were sympathetic, no one seemed to > have seen this specific problem before (if it's familiar, help would > still be absolutely welcome!)... it's been bugging me on and off, and
Sorry, I can't help there. > today I tried to use grep to look for this string somewhere in some > file on the system. > > now obviously the following doesn't work: > grep -r -*-*-medium-r-normal--14-*-*-*-c-*-iso8859-15 / > (*'s need to be escaped) > > slightly less obviously, neither does this: > grep -r -\*-\*-medium-r-normal--14-\*-\*-\*-c-\*-iso8859 / > (grep looks for a switch after the '-') > > and neither did this, which I tried more or less at random: > grep -r \-\*-\*-medium-r-normal--14-\*-\*-\*-c-\*-iso8859 / > > now, I've worked around the problem by using this: > grep -r medium-r-normal.*iso8559 / > > (which is running right now, and will probably take a while!) but I'm > curious: what's the CORRECT way to search for a string like this, > since I'm not interested in the dozens of files that seem to contain > similar (but not identical) expressions? I'm not sure whether there's a definitive method, but see what you think of this: 1. Use -e before a pattern beginning with a -, so that grep won't interpret the pattern as an option. 2. Quote the pattern string to prevent the shell interpreting special characters (* in your example). 3. Escape regular expression characters to force grep to match them exactly (* again in your example). So your grep would look like grep -r -e '-\*-\*-medium-r-normal--14-\*-\*-\*-c-\*-iso8859-15' / By the way, recursively searching from / will search all files on any network file systems you have mounted, which can take ages. If this affects you, you could try something like find / -xdev -type f | xargs -r grep -H -e '-\*-\*-medium-r-normal--14-\*-\*-\*-c-\*-iso8859-15' or find / ! -fstype nfs -type f | (etc.) -- Cheers, Clive -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
