On Fri, Jan 24, 2025 at 03:20:28AM +0000, Peter White wrote: > Hi there, > > I just stumbled on this by accidentally redirecting the output of a > colored grep invocation to a file like so: > > $ grep --color=always . /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/* > >thp-status.txt 2>/dev/null > # for convenience the 1st line of actual uncolored output > /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/defrag:always defer defer+madvise > [madvise] never > > Subsequently opening said file in vim I was overwhelmed with escape > sequences. From the looks of it every character in the match gets its > very own color escape sequence as opposed to the string indicating the > path to the file (everything before ':')
I did have a look at the code, after all, and even tried a premature "fix" which broke the foad1 test in the debian source package. But that made me realize that this is not a bug at all and grep did as designed by highlighting every single match which just happened to be every single character because of '.' being the pattern. I am sorry for wasting anyone's time and can only hope that this retraction reaches them before they might go chasing ghosts. Peter White
