grep "binary"

[Vlad Kudelin]

    Hi,

the following two commands were issued in a directory containing a
couple hundreds of subdirectories, each containing a file called
"txt.txt".

% grep ^'PATT ' */txt.txt |wc -l
   9333
% cat */txt.txt | grep ^'PATT '  | wc -l
  12198

The mistery gets solved after carefully comparing two outputs. In the
1st command, *some* files are treated as binary, hence instead of
strings grep prints a "Binary file matches..." message.

(Needless to say that all my files are equally "TEXT", with some utf-8
characters).

Would be nice to have the "Binary matching" feature documented in more
details.
 * "If the first few bytes of a file indicate that the file contains
binary data, ...."

 * "By default, under MS-DOS and MS-Windows, grep guesses the file type
              by looking at the contents of the first 32KB read from
the file."

don't help too much. Especially if one works under UNIX.

Thanks,

    Vlad.


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