Grep command binary file matches

Viewed 87k times. Chris Maes What output do you expect from grep? Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Try: grep --text or grep -a for short. The Overflow Blog. Podcast Making Agile work for data science. Stack Gives Back Featured on Meta. Show 8 more comments. Plouff Plouff 1, 1 1 gold badge 8 8 silver badges 3 3 bronze badges. This is the best, least expensive answer IMO. Would you mind to explain why it is not?

It would be good to make it clear, for all of us who find this answer as an option. Thanks :. A French accent diacritic in the text was causing grep to barf — zzapper. Ideal for grepping log files that might be partly corrupted — Hannes R. This is good. GNU grep 2. Only up to the first buffer read So if a NUL or encoding error happens in the middle of a very large file, it might be grepped anyways. I imagine this is for performance reasons. I got lazy. Impressive explication!

Also note that the check is only done on the first buffer read from the file which for a regular file seems to be bytes on my system, but for a pipe or socket can be as small as one byte. This happened to me as well. In particular, the cause was an ISOencoded non-breaking space, which I had to replace with a regular space in order to get grep to search in the file. This is e. That's 0xFC hexadecimal, so outside the range grep would expect for utf8 up to 0x7F.

More precisely, encoding error according to C99's mbrlen. Example and source interpretation at: unix. TPS 2, 5 5 gold badges 25 25 silver badges 44 44 bronze badges. Joan Pontius Joan Pontius 29 1 1 bronze badge. That sounds like a feature, not a bug. Not Sure Not Sure 11 2 2 bronze badges. I also had this problem but in my case it was caused when a matched line is too long. Martin Martin 5 5 bronze badges. The Overflow Blog. Podcast Making Agile work for data science.

Stack Gives Back Robyn Smith. Robyn Smith Robyn Smith 1 1 gold badge 7 7 silver badges 5 5 bronze badges. Did you try grep -a? Active Oldest Votes. By default, TYPE is binary, and grep normally outputs either a one-line message saying that a binary file matches, or no message if there is no match. If TYPE is without-match, grep assumes that a binary file does not match; this is equivalent to the -I option.

If TYPE is text, grep processes a binary file as if it were text; this is equivalent to the -a option. Axel Knauf Axel Knauf 1, 1 1 gold badge 10 10 silver badges 12 12 bronze badges. Add a comment. Mike Scott Mike Scott 7, 29 29 silver badges 26 26 bronze badges. Lena Schimmel 1 1 silver badge 10 10 bronze badges. I think this is the best answer here. It is so annoying to see bad implementations of binary search like here commandlinefu. I would assume get fafafafa , since I was searching this.

No manual in man. Any idea why such an output? I opened a new thread about the functioning of bgrep here stackoverflow.

Unfortunately, bash: bgrep: command not found Andrew Schulman 8, 21 21 gold badges 29 29 silver badges 45 45 bronze badges.