Re: Bug in 'grep'ing for string in /proc/registry...

[L A Walsh <cygwin@tlinx.org>]

On 9/7/2020 12:05 AM, Brian Inglis wrote:

>> /bin/grep -Pr '\.dll'
>> /bin/grep: Group: Is a directory
>> /bin/grep: ImagePath: Is a directory
----
	ImagePath is a expandable string value under the Eventlog
key. 'ls -l' shows ImagePath has having 65 bytes.

> ll ImagePath
 -r--r----- 1 65 Sep  6 22:06 ImagePath

	Reading the contents, one gets:
 
>>> read -r x <ImagePath
>>> echo $x
>> C:\Windows\System32\svchost.exe -k LocalServiceNetworkRestricted
>> whose length is ${#x} = 64 (not counting end-of-string)

> You remember that the /proc/registry.../ entries are only the 
> keys, subkeys, and kk values names, not the data contained in them.
---
	Not exactly.  Keys are the fs-equivalent of directories,
subkeys are the equivalent of subdirectories, and values are filenames
that usually contain content.  Any util that would normally read
file-content (or scan through it, like grep) will read the content in
registry values.

> You are doing the equivalent of:
> $ fgrep -r .dll
---
	Correct.  Which is almost the same as
fgrep -r .dll .

with the difference that results with the "." will have a "./" on
the front of the names, i.e. 

>> /bin/fgrep -r .dll .
>> /bin/fgrep: ./Group: Is a directory
>> /bin/fgrep: ./ImagePath: Is a directory
----
	I'm not sure, but it looks like you may be confusing
the function & output of 'find' and grep?  Where find looks only
at the names, whereas 'grep' scans for the text string in the
content of the files.  Given the '-r' param, 'grep' will descend
into directories -- not attempt to scan them as text files.

> producing nothing but error messages.
---
	Normally text files are not classified as directories.
Both 'ls' and 'bash' classify keys as 'directories', while values,
of every sort are classified as files.

linda