Hi, When piping a certain diff into grep-2.21, it sometimes thinks it is a binary file, and sometimes treats it as text. The latter behaviour is expected and desired. I think grep should never consider standard input to be binary.
For lack of a simple recipe, here is the actual use case: wget http://http.debian.net/debian/pool/main/g/gtkorphan/gtkorphan_0.4.4.orig.tar.gz tar -xf gtkorphan_0.4.4.orig.tar.gz cd gtkorphan-0.4.4/ mkdir fresh # the command rsync does not work at this location: for lang in pt_BR bg zh_CN hr cs da nl eo fi fr de hu id it lv pl ru sr sv vi; do \ wget http://translationproject.org/PO-files/$lang/gtkorphan-0.4.3.$lang.po -O fresh/$lang.po; \ done diff -ur po fresh | /usr/local/bin/grep "Only in" | grep "fi" That last command sometimes outputs: Only in fresh: fi.po Only in po: Makefile.in.in and sometimes: Binary file (standard input) matches (If you can't get the second output, try hitting Enter a few times and then running the command again, and again, and again. If you still can't get both outputs, try using the en_US.utf8 locale.) What seems to happening is that sometimes grep will look far enough to see the diff between po/fr.po and fresh/fr.po (which contains some ISO8859-1 codes), and sometimes not. When deleting fresh/bg.po and fresh/de.po, grep will always see those codes and will always consider the input to be binary. I can of course use -a to force grep to see standard input as text, but still... I think the determining whether a file is text or binary should be deterministic: it should always yield the same result when the input is the same. $ /usr/local/bin/grep --version | head -1 /usr/local/bin/grep (GNU grep) 2.21 $ grep --version | head -1 grep (GNU grep) 2.21 $ diff --version | head -1 diff (GNU diffutils) 2.8.1 $ locale LANG=eo.utf8 LANGUAGE=en LC_CTYPE="eo.utf8" LC_NUMERIC="eo.utf8" LC_TIME="eo.utf8" LC_COLLATE="eo.utf8" LC_MONETARY="eo.utf8" LC_MESSAGES="eo.utf8" LC_PAPER="eo.utf8" LC_NAME="eo.utf8" LC_ADDRESS="eo.utf8" LC_TELEPHONE="eo.utf8" LC_MEASUREMENT="eo.utf8" LC_IDENTIFICATION="eo.utf8" LC_ALL= Benno -- http://www.fastmail.com - Accessible with your email software or over the web
