grep-3.8

[Douglas R. Reno]

New minor version

[Bruce Dubbs]

NEWS

• Noteworthy changes in release 3.8 (2022-09-02) [stable]

Changes in behavior

The -P option is now based on PCRE2 instead of the older PCRE, thanks to code contributed by Carlo Arenas.

The egrep and fgrep commands, which have been deprecated since release 2.5.3 (2007), now warn that they are obsolescent and should be replaced by grep -E and grep -F.

The confusing GREP_COLOR environment variable is now obsolescent. Instead of GREP_COLOR='xxx', use GREP_COLORS='mt=xxx'. grep now warns if GREP_COLOR is used and is not overridden by GREP_COLORS. Also, grep now treats GREP_COLOR like GREP_COLORS by silently ignoring it if it attempts to inject ANSI terminal escapes.

Regular expressions with stray backslashes now cause warnings, as their unspecified behavior can lead to unexpected results. For example, '\a' and 'a' are not always equivalent <​https://bugs.gnu.org/39678>. Similarly, regular expressions or subexpressions that start with a repetition operator now also cause warnings due to their unspecified behavior; for example, *a(+b|{1}c) now has three reasons to warn. The warnings are intended as a transition aid; they are likely to be errors in future releases.

Regular expressions like [:space:] are now errors even if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, since POSIX now allows the GNU behavior.

Bug fixes

In locales using UTF-8 encoding, the regular expression '.' no longer sometimes fails to match Unicode characters U+D400 through U+D7FF (some Hangul Syllables, and Hangul Jamo Extended-B) and Unicode characters U+108000 through U+10FFFF (half of Supplemental Private Use Area plane B). [bug introduced in grep 3.4]

The -s option no longer suppresses "binary file matches" messages. [Bug#51860 introduced in grep 3.5]

Documentation improvements

The manual now covers unspecified behavior in patterns like \x, (+), and range expressions outside the POSIX locale.

[Bruce Dubbs]

Fixed at commit 917868fc69f30b569aea433f547d9d4cc89b6c52

Update to shadow-4.12.3.
Update to Python3-3.10.7.
Update to linux-5.19.7.
Update to less-608.
Update to grep-3.8.