On Monday 11 May 2015 21:27:35 Paul Eggert wrote: > Perhaps we can improve the behavior of grep by changing its heuristic > slightly. Currently grep reports "Binary file FOO matches" if it finds > binary data in FOO before it finds the first match. Instead, perhaps we > could change grep to report "Binary file FOO matches" when it sees that > it's about to generate binary *output* copied from FOO, regardless of > whether this output represents the first match. That is, when grep sees > that it's about to output binary data, grep instead outputs "Binary file > FOO matches" and then stops output for FOO (even if it already output some > lines for ordinary matches in FOO). > > This approach would fix the problem of grep trashing the output stream, and > it should be less drastic than grep's current approach, in that it would > make grep more likely to do what Kamil Dudka is asking for (assuming grep > is given mostly valid input interspersed with small amounts of binary > data).
Thanks for the suggestion! I believe that such approach would work for me. Do you want me to write a patch implementing it? Eric, what do you think about the change proposed above? Kamil
