grep annoyance!

[Alan Dayley]

GNU grep has annoyed me for a very long time for this one "fault" and it
happened again just now.  I had to whine about it.

- Suppose I have a directory structure like so:
project1---ui------frame.c
         |       |-enter.c
         |       \-ui.h
         |-logic---main.c
         |       |-transaction.c
         |       \-main.h
         |-README
         \-COPYING

- Suppose I want to do a grep seach of all the .c files for "string"

I go to the project1 directory and issue the command and get this result:

$grep -r string *.c
grep: *.c: No such file or directory
$

The Annoyance: The '-r' option is supposed to recurse the subdirectories
in the tree.  BUT, it fails and stops the search because my current
directory, project1, does not have any files that match '*.c'  It does not
recurse!

I have gotten around this in the past by doing 'touch bogus.c' in the
current directory so that it will not fail and will start recursing.  But
that is a lousy workaround.

Is there a option to grep that I just don't understand yet that will make
grep recurse even if the current directory doesn't have a match on the
file expression?

Alan