GNU bug report logs - #19348
grep-2.21 cannot match patterns with NULLs in binary files

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From: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
To: Jaroslav Skarvada <jskarvad <at> redhat.com>, 19348 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#19348: grep-2.21 cannot match patterns with NULLs in binary files
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2014 21:24:35 -0800

Jaroslav Skarvada wrote:

> This new behaviour is not documented in manual page

The full manual says "When matching binary data, grep may treat non-text bytes 
as line terminators."  See:

http://www.gnu.org/software/grep/manual/html_node/File-and-Directory-Selection.html

> [1]https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1172405
> [2]https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1172804

Those are both essentially the same bug, right?  And the symptoms are a wrong 
diagnostic but the application still works?  Anyway, I filed a bug report for 
that application here:

http://bugs.debian.org/772901

because a portable shell script cannot use 'grep' on binary data -- POSIX says 
the behavior is undefined.  It's not clear that GNU grep needs a new option to 
resurrect the 2.20 behavior, as the -a option suffices here just as well as any 
new option would, and -a is more portable.

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