I just ran grep -ri foo someDir/
I got back
someDir//foo/bar/baz: onDelete() {
Does the double forward slash just mean that everything to the left of it was in the dir argument you provided to grep?
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I think this problem will not occur if you do this: grep -ri delete someDir ...? – Luciano Andress Martini Jun 09 '16 at 17:55
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When you run the command:
grep -r <pattern> <directory>
it prints all the filenames as <directory>/<filename>. If you put a slash at the end of <directory>, it will be included in that, so you end up with a double slash.
The code could have been smart enough to notice when the original directory name ends with / and omit it when printing filenames, but they didn't bother. I think the only special case it makes is for the root directory, e.g.
grep -r pattern /
will print /foo/bar/baz rather than //foo/bar/baz. This is because POSIX specifies that a sequence of slashes is treated equivalently to a single slash except that two slashes at the beginning have implementation-dependent meaning (this is because some network file system mechanisms made use of syntax like //server/pathname). See How does Linux handle multiple consecutive path separators (/home////username///file)?
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+1. worth noting is that (with the possible exception of some badly written scripts) unix doesn't care if a pathname has extra
/s in it./path/to/filenameis functionally the same as////path//to/////////////filename. This is extremely useful when writing scripts that work with directory and filenames in variables, just append them to each other with an extra/and it'll Just Work. also worth noting is that most URI types requireprotocolname://at the start....the double-/matters there. – cas Jun 10 '16 at 02:25