On 08/01/2012 07:28 AM, Martin Carroll wrote: > Why do you prefer > > Binary file matches > > over > > [binary data]an occurence of open[binary data] > [binary data]another occurence of open[binary data]
Typically the latter output is far too long and takes up too much of my screen. I can get that output if I want it, by using 'grep -a', but I hardly ever want it. I take your point that the Unix philosophy is for tools to not care about text versus binary data, but in practice that philosophy was never implemented for 'grep' -- the original v7 grep messed up with binary data -- and in general for tools that are text-oriented (grep, diff) having the default behavior be to treat binary data as text might not be the best thing.
