Recursion with grep?

[Francisco Reyes]

On Thu, 13 Nov 2003, Matthew Hunt wrote:

> > The man page for grep says to use "-r" to recurse, yet when I try
> > something like
> >
> > grep -r -li string *.c
> >
> > I get no files. However, if I go into one of the subdirectories and do a
> > plain grep <string> *.c then <string> is found on several files.
>
> When using "-r", the arguments to grep should be directories.  It will
> process all of the files in the given directories, recursively.  There is
> no provision for searching a subset of the files (i.e. "*.c).  If you
> need to do that, use find and xargs.


I wonder how difficult this would be to fix/change.
Seems strange nobody has looked into this.

For someone familiar with C how long you think it would take to change?
Sounds like a good small project to pay someone to look into it. :-)