grep-3.5

[Bruce Dubbs]

New minor version.

• Noteworthy changes in release 3.5 (2020-09-27) [stable]

• Changes in behavior

The message that a binary file matches is now sent to standard error and the message has been reworded from "Binary file FOO matches" to "grep: FOO: binary file matches", to avoid confusion with ordinary output or when file names contain spaces and the like, and to be more consistent with other diagnostics. For example, commands like 'grep PATTERN FILE | wc' no longer add 1 to the count of matching text lines due to the presence of the message. Like other stderr messages, the message is now omitted if the --no-messages (-s) option is given.

Two other stderr messages now use the typical form too. They are now "grep: FOO: warning: recursive directory loop" and "grep: FOO: input file is also the output".

The --files-without-match (-L) option has reverted to its behavior in grep 3.1 and earlier. That is, grep -L again succeeds when a line is selected, not when a file is listed. The behavior in grep 3.2 through 3.4 was causing compatibility problems.

• Bug fixes

grep -I no longer issues a spurious "Binary file FOO matches" line. [Bug 33552 introduced in grep 2.23]

In UTF-8 locales, grep -w no longer ignores a multibyte word constituent just before what would otherwise be a word match. [Bug 43225 introduced in grep 2.28]

grep -i no longer mishandles ASCII characters that match multibyte characters. For example, 'LC_ALL=tr_TR.utf8 grep -i i' no longer dumps core merely because 'i' matches 'İ' (U+0130 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I WITH DOT ABOVE) in Turkish when ignoring case. [Bug 43577 introduced partly in grep 2.28 and partly in grep 3.4]

A performance regression with -E and many patterns has been mostly fixed. "Mostly" as there is a performance tradeoff between Bug#22357 and Bug#40634. [Bug 40634 introduced in grep 2.28]

A performance regression with many duplicate patterns has been fixed. [Bug 43040 introduced in grep 3.4]

An N^{2 RSS performance regression with many patterns has been fixed in common cases (no backref, and no use of -o or --color). With only 80,000 lines of /usr/share/dict/linux.words, the following would use 100GB of RSS and take 3 minutes. With the fix, it used less than 400MB and took less than one second:}

head -80000 /usr/share/dict/linux.words > w; grep -vf w w

[Bug 43527 introduced in grep 3.4]

• Build-related

"make dist" builds .tar.gz files again, as they are still used in some barebones builds.

[Bruce Dubbs]

Fixed at revision 12051.