Re: GNU grep behavior

[Stepan Kasal]

Hallo Dave,

On Wed, Aug 25, 2004 at 02:02:59PM +0100, Dave Hines wrote:
> Although I see that an option (-a, --text, --binary-files=text) exist to
> change this,

I'd add that you can set environment variable GREP_OPTIONS=--text

> I think that the new grep is wrong for two reasons:
> 
> 1) Effort should be made not to break things when changes are made.
>    The old behavior should be retained as the default case, and new
>    behavior should be enabled by a switch, not disabled.

I agree with this in most cases.  But applying this rule strictly would
preserve all misfeatures introduced by a mistake in design.

>    (I have always been annoyed by software that thinks it knows better
>    than I do, especially when it is wrong).

I have the same feelings.  I'm sad that grep got among them.

> 2) The "Binary file %s matches\n" message should be sent to stderr,
>    not stdout. The output of grep is supposed to be lines selected from
>    the input, which that message is not.

I don't agree.  The message is not a diagnostics message, it's a special
way of displaying data which are suspected to be binary garbage.

Sorry for the inconvenience,
        Stepan Kasal