Contrary to the description in the grep man page the option "-D skip" doesn't make grep skip FIFOs (named pipes). The bug has been fixed in grep CVS more than a year ago, but unfortunately they have not released a new version for about the same time. The patch for this bug can be found at http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grep-commit/2004-11/msg00095.html. I'd appreciate it if it could be added to the Gentoo ebuild for grep 2.5.1. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. mkfifo fifo 2. grep -D skip pattern fifo 3. Actual Results: grep tries to open the FIFO and blocks. Expected Results: grep should identify the file as FIFO and skip it (as described in the man page).
thanks, added to grep-2.5.1-r9