At 04:27 AM 12/23/99 -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote [in part]:
>I tried that grep command, while trying to find something in that R. H. 5.2 man
>about my Crystal CS 423x sound card my syntax in /usr/man was:
>
>grep Crystal 432x
>
>I watched for many minutes as there was no output ( I was in command line).
>After about five minutes with still no out put :
>
> <3fingers>
>
> Should I look elsewhere? Is my usage wrong?
Usage for grep (omitting flags; read the man page for that) is
grep somestring somefile
where
somestring = the string you want to search for. If it contains
spaces, enclose it in quotes.
somefile = the filename you want to secrch in. This can include
wildcards and (I think) multiple file names.
So ... the sample grep try you wrote above asked grep to look in the file
432x for the string Crystal. It should have returned, almost immediately,
something like:
grep: 432x: file not found
Why didn't it? Either your system has a problem that I can't think of, or
you didn't quote what you tried accurately. If, for example, you actually
entered:
grep "Crystal 432x"
rather than
grep Crystal 432x
you would have provided no filename, just a multi-word search string, so
grep would have waited for input from stdin (in this case, the keyboard) to
parse for the requested phrase. This can look like a system hang; the way
out of it is to enter ^D (Unix's end-of-file marker) to tell grep that the
input stream from stdin has ended. Or, as someone else suggested, ^C will
interrupt the process, and ^Z will drop it into the background. Or, as a
last resort, you can go to a different vt and run "killall grep" (most Linux
systems have the killall command, but not all do) to end the process.
------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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