GNU bug report logs - #60697
GNU grep mishandles \b near encoding errors

Previous Next

Full log

View this message in rfc822 format

From: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
To: 60697 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#60697: GNU grep mishandles \b near encoding errors
Date: Mon, 9 Jan 2023 15:00:15 -0800

Here's a shell session illustrating the problem on Fedora 37, which has 
GNU grep 3.7. The same bug is still in bleeding-edge GNU grep.

  $ export LC_ALL=en_US.utf8
  $ printf '\300\n' | grep '\b'
  grep: (standard input): binary file matches
  $ printf '\300\n' | grep -P '\b'
  $

Plain grep finds a word boundary in the input even though the input 
contains no words (just an encoding error). 'grep -P' does the right thing.

The underlying issue is in the glibc regex code so the fix should be in 
glibc / Gnulib, but I thought I'd report it here before I forgot it.

Previous Next

GNU bug tracking system
Copyright (C) 1999 Darren O. Benham, 1997,2003 nCipher Corporation Ltd, 1994-97 Ian Jackson.