Norihiro Tanaka wrote:
Hmm, diff does not output "Binary file matches" between text files, but grep does it.
I wasn't referring to the exact string "Binary file matches", merely to the idea that diff outputs a message to stdout saying that there was a binary file, rather than to stderr. Something like this:
$ diff /usr/bin/diff /usr/bin/emacs 2>/dev/null Binary files /usr/bin/diff and /usr/bin/emacs differ
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.
Although that's a problem, it's not a serious one, as one can easily work around it by using -n or -H. If there were need, I suppose we could add another operand to the --binary option to cause it to do something else with a match.
