On Wed, 6 Apr 2016 18:25:16 -0700 Paul Eggert <egg...@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
> On 04/06/2016 04:15 PM, Eric Blake wrote: > > And yes, maybe we could change grep to print the "Binary file matches" > > message to stderr, but that in turn will probably break other scripts, > > and lead to even more complaints from people doing non-standard things > > and expecting consistent results. > > Yes, I'm dubious about this idea. grep's behavior was inspired by > diff's similar behavior, and grep and diff have worked that way for > many years and I expect people depend on it. POSIX says that diff > should output its binary-file message to stdout, and I expect that if > POSIX standardized grep's behavior on binary files it would do > something similar. Hmm, diff does not output "Binary file matches" between text files, but grep does it. $ cp src/grep grep.bin $ LC_ALL=en_US.utf8 src/grep g grep.bin Binary file grep.bin matches $ cat >grep.bin <<EOF Binary file grep.bin matches EOF $ LC_ALL=en_US.utf8 src/grep g grep.bin Binary file grep.bin matches When a user got "Binary file matches" from grep, he can distinguish whether matched a binary file or a line including "Binary file matches" of a text file from only this result.
