On Sat, 24 Apr 2010 09:04:40 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

> Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> 
>> Yesterday, the 'parted' tool was giving me a totally cryptic error
>> message.
>> 
>> $ apt-get source parted
>> $ cd parted-2.2
>> $ grep -rn "error message here" .
>> 
>> -r makes search recursive, -n makes grep output line numbers next to
>> the filenames. Then I opened a text editor on the file and line number
>> that grep mentioned, and tried to figure out the code :)
> 
> Isn't trying to figure out why an arbitrary piece of code doesn't work
> formally equivilent to the Halting Problem? (With non-termination simply
> being the most basic kind of program bug...)

You're not asking grep to tell you why it failed, just to tell you where 
in the code the error is so one can manually inspect the file and see if 
one can determine why the failure occurred.

Done that many times myself.

Jim

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