grep does not work in particular folder on centos?

Question

It's a bit strange with the grep command. When I am in the mail folder, it always produces help text. At first, I thought I had wrong synxtax but it is working on its parent folder. What could be the cause? TIA!

[xx]$ grep "abc" *.out
grep: invalid option -- '-'
Usage: grep [OPTION]... PATTERN [FILE]...
Try 'grep --help' for more information.
[xx]$ cd ..
[xx]$ grep "abc" mail/*.out
mail/0940-cron-mail.out:News 3598...h...N

Could help : https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/364922/grep-getting-confused-by-filenames-with-dashes — krisFR, Nov 03 '17 at 07:05

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 03 '17 at 07:01

3

You have a file in that directory that starts with the character '-'.

When you grep in the directory, the * expands out all the filenames, and grep interprets the one with the leading - as an option, and fails to parse it.

When your grep includes the directory path, the * still expands the filenames out, but now the - is in the middle of the path+filename, so isn't interpreted as a commandline option

answered Nov 03 '17 at 07:01

Daniel Lawson

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3

So OP needs to say `grep "abc" -- *.out` – fedorqui Nov 03 '17 at 08:36
Thanks! that helps! I tried this and it works too. grep "ab" ./*.out – Dat TT Nov 08 '17 at 00:59

grep does not work in particular folder on centos?

1 Answers1