Subject: Re: latest grep considers text files as binary

From: Thomas Wolff <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 05 Dec 2014 10:58:49 +0100

Paul Eggert wrote:
>> the mentioned patches are apparently intended to fix issues in 
>> non-UTF-8 locales.
> No, they're also needed for UTF-8 locales I'm afraid.  There are some 
> security issues, not only having to do with grep's internals, but also 
> for the behavior of downstream programs that may be expecting UTF-8 text.
>
> You can work around the problem with 'grep -a'.
I was aware of this workaround but I claim it should not be needed 
because the files affected are in fact not binary files but text files. 
The manual clearly says about -a: "Process a binary file as if it were 
text" but partial content in a different text encoding does not make a 
file binary.

Jim Meyering wrote:
>   this is due to documented and desirable behavior.
I deny this is desirable behavior and I doubt there is a security issue 
as described. If any other, independent software has a security issue 
with non-UTF-8 input, it should decide itself to filter it and use 
accordingly stable decoding functions. It cannot be the task of any tool 
(grep in this case) to filter output to work around possible security 
issues in other programs in a pipe. This would be completely against the 
concept of pipes in the Unix tradition.

Honestly I think this is another case of practical usefulness losing 
against dogma in software design.

Kind regards,
Thomas