GNU bug report logs - #24134
problem with fgrep - only matches if I leave off the last character of the line

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Message #5 received at submit <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: SZIGETVÁRI János <jszigetvari <at> gmail.com>
To: bug-grep <at> gnu.org
Subject: problem with fgrep - only matches if I leave off the last character
 of the line
Date: Tue, 2 Aug 2016 14:37:33 +0200

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

Dear Developer Team,

I have encountered a problem related to fgrep, while I was trying to search
back and forth in a file filled with a number of log messages.
I have managed to narrow down the input file to a few lines, and also wrote
a reproduction guide for it.
I have checked it with a few different grep versions, but not all seemed to
be affected.
Grep 2.6.3 (CentOS 6) and 2.16 (Ubuntu 14.04) were, and 2.25 (Unbuntu
16.04) wasn't.

The problem basically was, that I was fgrepping for messages in syslog-ng
debug logs, and I was looking for matches that matched the log lines, that
were sent to syslog-ng (ie. messages about incoming log messages), and
there were a few messages, where there was no match for the whole message,
but if I removed the last character of the string I was grepping for, then
it did return a match.
The match also showed the character I removed previously, so it was unclear
why there was no match with the last character, and why there was without...

I tried to look for already closed bugs that looked similar, but I did not
manage to find anything similar.

Thanks for your help!

Best Regards,
János Szigetvári

-- 
Janos SZIGETVARI
RHCE, License no. 150-053-692
<https://www.redhat.com/rhtapps/verify/?certId=150-053-692>

E-mail: jszigetvari <at> gmail.com
Phone: +36209440412 (Hungary)

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[Message part 2 (text/html, inline)]

[reproduction-guide.txt (text/plain, attachment)]

[reproduction-sample.txt (text/plain, attachment)]

Message #10 received at 24134-done <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
To: SZIGETVÁRI János <jszigetvari <at> gmail.com>,
 24134-done <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#24134: problem with fgrep - only matches if I leave off the
 last character of the line
Date: Tue, 2 Aug 2016 09:54:43 -0700

SZIGETVÁRI János wrote:
> I tried to look for already closed bugs that looked similar, but I did not
> manage to find anything similar.

Thanks for the bug report. We have fixed several bugs with fgrep since grep 2.16 
came out. For what it's worth, I could not reproduce the bug with grep 2.20 
(RHEL 6.8) either. Since the bug does not appear to occur with recent grep 
versions, I'm inclined to close the bug report.

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