On 02/29/2016 12:34 PM, Marcello Perathoner wrote:
On 02/29/2016 08:29 PM, Paul Eggert wrote:
They would 'blast' their terminals without grep too.
Sure, but in practice it's common for users to do something like this:
grep -r getaddrinfo_a *
I just now did this in my working copy of the GNU Emacs source code. If
-a were the default, I would see 13874778 bytes on my screen, the vast
majority of which would be useless or even harmful. As grep stands now,
I see just 5480 bytes and they're mostly useful.
I was lucky in that I noticed that a 17GB tar file could not be a
complete backup of a 500GB drive.
Yes, you were lucky there. But you were unlucky in that your backup
software invoked grep without worrying about file name validity. Suppose
a file name contained a newline? Your backups could be toast.
At least ... make the new behaviour optional.
It is optional; we merely disagree about the option's default value.
Since 2.21 I will now have to always specify -a or LC_ALL=C when
grepping my files.
I suggest using -a. LC_ALL=C won't work the way that you want on
platforms where the C locale is UTF-8, or is pure ASCII. For example, on
Fedora 23 or RHEL 7 with grep 2.23 we have:
$ printf '\200\n' | LC_ALL=C grep .
Binary file (standard input) matches
This is because the C locale is pure ASCII on these platforms, i.e.,
'\200' is not a valid character the way it is with traditional Unix. I
don't know why Red Hat made that change.
