Re: SEEK_HOLE defined but useless on linux-3.4+/ext4 [Re: small ascii files can be sparse

[Martin Carroll]

Hi Paul,

> The same idea would apply to other tools that
> want to do something special for binary versus
> text files.

The problem, as I'm sure you know, is that unix intentionally
does not differentiate ascii from binary files, and I'm not sure
the tools should either.

> If I type 'grep -rw 'open' *', I don't want to see
> all the strings containing 'open' in random *.o files
> that happen to be lying around

Why do you prefer

    Binary file matches

over

    [binary data]an occurence of open[binary data]
    [binary data]another occurence of open[binary data]

The latter output is more in keeping with unix philosophy:
You asked to see occurrences of "open" in this file, so here
they are.  If you don't want to see all those occurrences,
then type:

    grep -r open * | fgrep -v '[binary data]'

mar