grep RFE: End-of-Line choices

[Mabry Tyson]

In Mac OS X, we deal with files that end with LF (Unix) or CR (Mac) 
endings, and sometimes with CR LF endings.   With the dual nature of Mac 
OS X (being partly Unix and yet supporting the previous Mac files), it 
is likely that this situation will remain for a long time.  It is a real 
pain for grep to return the entire file as a single line when it searchs 
a file with Mac end-of-line conventions.

Apparently for DOS/Windows, grep has the capability for dealing with 
files that have either a CR LF or LF ending.

I would like to encourage the inclusion of the DOS capability for 
allowing CR LF to be accepted (under a switch to grep) and to add the 
capability to accept line endings that are CR instead of LF.   This 
could be done by doing the same coding as for CR LF, but instead of 
dropping the CR, change it to LF.

It seems unlikely that you could find a single character switch to 
control this.  My suggestion would be something like
  --eol=<vals>
where <vals> =  <eol>(,<eol>)*
where <eol> = LF | CR | CRLF
The default would be OS-specific.  For most unix systems, it would be 
LF.  For DOS/Windows, it would be LF,CRLF.  For Mac OS X, it should be 
LF,CR.

I don't know if there are other EOL conventions that might also be 
adopted in the same edit.