Dear Madam or Sir, That problem almost ruined my work today. I made the following note to myself but you might be also interested: === current grep (2.25) is much faster than 2.5.4 from Lucid but SKIPS "binary" lines in ssconvert output, freshly compiled grep 3.0 skips less but still does it. Workaround: look for "binary match" phrase in the end of file and apply grep -a. Report to https://www.gnu.org/software/grep/manual/html_node/Reporting-Bugs.html ? === The file of question (gzipped) is attached. My system: === $ uname -a Linux ... 4.4.0-62-generic #83-Ubuntu SMP Wed Jan 18 14:10:15 UTC 2017 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux === Commands which reproduce the problem: === grep . usa-format.txt > 1 grep -a . usa-format.txt > 2 diff 1 2 === Again, the problem exists with both Ubuntu Xenial default grep 2.25 and new grep 3.0 With best wishes, Alexey Shipunov