Subject: bug#65722: Bug in your grep tool

From: Seth David Schoen <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2023 21:51:22 -0700

Eduard Mironenko writes:

> Hi,
> 
> I used grep tool to find a simple keyword in one of my repositories but the
> tool could not find anything:

Hi Eduard,

You submitted this bug to the GNU grep project, but based on your man
page excerpt, the version of grep on your system is not actually GNU
grep, but rather some form of BSD grep (a different implementation with
a different code base).  If you're on macOS, many of the system utilities
won't be GNU versions by default; macOS is more heavily based on BSD
systems, and Apple isn't fond of the software licenses used by the
GNU project.

If you have GNU grep, you can tell by running a command like

$ grep --version
grep (GNU grep) 3.4
Copyright (C) 2020 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

I don't think the volunteers here will be able to solve a problem with
a different grep implementation -- definitely not in case the problem
is really a bug in a different version of grep.

The BSD grep implementation does understand -r and -l in the same way
as the GNU implementation, so something like your command should work.

It would be helpful to have copy-and-pasted textual output in your
submission instead of screenshot images.  The screenshots don't
confirm whether you might have accidentally typed a lookalike character
(like 1 instead of l) in your search pattern, or whether there might be
some other character that isn't interpreted as it appears (like somehow
accidentally typing Cyrillic а instead of ASCII a, or any other pair
of characters that may appear visually identical but be interpreted
differently by your computer).