[plug] grep hangs

[Craig Ringer]

On Tue, 2005-09-20 at 16:49 +0800, Jim Householder wrote:
> Hi
> 
> On a number of occasions I have tried to use grep and had it sit there 
> doing nothing.   More likely in an emacs shell than a terminal window.
> 
> I am having problems with tv cards and sound, so I thought a quick scan 
> of /var (should have specified /var/log, I know) for "/dev/sound" might 
> turn up something.
> 
> grep started, printed 2 error messages concerning non-existent files, 
> and then sat there forever with state S+ - foreground, interruptible 
> sleep waiting for an event to complete.

It's probably trying to read from a named pipe. You may have better luck
using:

find /var -type f -print0 | xargs grep -H "your-pattern"

... though to be honest, grepping all of /var is probably not really
useful most of the time.

--
Craig Ringer