grep-3.6

[Bruce Dubbs]

New minor version.

[Bruce Dubbs]

This is to announce grep-3.6, a stable release.

There have been 18 commits by 3 people in the 6 weeks since 3.5.

This release has two important changes, a fix for a bug introduced in grep-3.2 (from late 2018) and the removal of support for the long-deprecated GREP_OPTIONS envvar.

• Noteworthy changes in release 3.6 (2020-11-08) [stable]

• Changes in behavior

The GREP_OPTIONS environment variable no longer affects grep's behavior. The variable was declared obsolescent in grep 2.21 (2014), and since then any use had caused grep to issue a diagnostic.

• Bug fixes

grep's DFA matcher performed an invalid regex transformation that would convert an ERE like a+a+a+ to a+a+, which would make grep a+a+a+ mistakenly match "aa". [Bug#44351 introduced in grep 3.2]

grep -P now reports the troublesome input filename upon PCRE execution failure. Before, searching many files for something rare might fail with just "exceeded PCRE's backtracking limit". Now, it also reports which file triggered the failure.

[Bruce Dubbs]

Fixed at revision 12060.