Paul Eggert wrote: > Bjoern Voigt wrote: >> This is clearly a bug in my eyes. > > The behavior conforms to grep's spec, so it's not a bug in that sense. > I don't offhand see a behavior change that wouldn't cause worse > problems elsewhere. Unless you were thinking of adding an option? The current manual page patched with "0001-doc-remove-obsolete-MS-DOS-mention-2.patch" says:
--binary-files=TYPE If the first few bytes of a file indicate that the file contains binary data, assume that the file is of type TYPE. By default, TYPE is binary, and grep normally outputs either a one-line message saying that a binary file matches, or no message if there is no match. If TYPE is without-match, grep assumes that a binary file does not match; this is equivalent to the -I option. If TYPE is text, grep processes a binary file as if it were text; this is equivalent to the -a option. When processing binary data, grep may treat non-text bytes as line terminators; for example, the pattern '.' (period) might not match a null byte, as the null byte might be treated as a line terminator. Warning: grep --binary-files=text might output binary garbage, which can have nasty side effects if the output is a terminal and if the terminal driver interprets some of it as commands. My test case where a files starts with more than 32KB text data and continues with text data with at least one embedded 0 character (which makes this binary data) is undocumented. Consequently I probably search a new option "--binary-files=auto" which also should by the default sometime later. For files it should work as follows: --binary-files=auto If the first few bytes of a file indicate that the file contains binary data, assume that the file is of type binary. Otherwise assume that the file is of type text. Since the behavior of --binary-files=binary for my testcase is undocumented and since the output is more or less useless except of the fact that some not-printable characters on terminal are suppressed, it would be also an option to change --binary-files=binary mode in code and in the manual page. For files as input data this is easy to implement. But I haven't checked, how --binary-files should work with standard input. The decision binary or text should be made there before the first match is printed. My MySQL mysqldump problem can be solved with --text or --binary-files=text. So I do not search a quick solution anymore. Regards, Björn
