We manufacture a linux appliance for data centers, and all are running fedora installed from the same kickstart process. There are different hardware versions, some with IDE hard drives and some SCSI, so the filesystems may be at /dev/sdaN or /dev/hdaN.

We have a web interface into these appliances that show disk usage, which is generated using "df | grep /dev/*da". This generally works for both hardware versions, giving an output like follows:

/dev/sda2              5952284   3507816   2137228  63% /
/dev/sda5             67670876   9128796  55049152  15% /data
/dev/sda1               101086     11976     83891  13% /boot

However, for one machine, we get the following result from that command:

Binary file /dev/sda matches

It seems that its grepping files matching /dev/*da for an unknown pattern for some reason, only on this box that is seemingly identical in grep version, packages, kernel, and hardware. I switched the grep pattern to be "/dev/.da" and everything works as expected on this troublesome box, but I hate not knowing why this is happening. Anyone have any ideas? Or perhaps some other tests to try?