GNU bug report logs - #19242
latest grep considers text files as binary

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Message #22 received at 19242 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Eric Blake <eblake <at> redhat.com>
To: Jim Meyering <jim <at> meyering.net>, Thomas Wolff <towo <at> computer.org>
Cc: Jim Meyering <meyering <at> fb.com>, Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>,
 19242 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#19242: latest grep considers text files as binary
Date: Fri, 05 Dec 2014 08:36:17 -0700

[Message part 1 (text/plain, inline)]

On 12/05/2014 08:00 AM, Jim Meyering wrote:

>>
>> 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.
> 
> This is another side effect of using a multibyte locale.
> As long as there are no NUL bytes in your input, you can work
> around the issue by running grep in the C locale:
> 
>   LC_ALL=C grep ...

Yes, the C locale has the nice effect of EVERY byte being a valid single
byte character, leaving only NUL bytes and a non-empty file not ending
in newline as the only reasons for a file to be marked binary.

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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