Grep Changelog

What's new in Grep 2.21

Nov 24, 2014
  • Improvements:
  • Performance has been greatly improved for searching files containing holes, on platforms where lseek's SEEK_DATA flag works efficiently.
  • Performance has improved for rejecting data that cannot match even the first part of a nontrivial pattern.
  • Performance has improved for very long strings in patterns.
  • If a file contains data improperly encoded for the current locale, and this is discovered before any of the file's contents are output, grep now treats the file as binary.
  • grep -P no longer reports an error and exits when given invalid UTF-8 data. Instead, it considers the data to be non-matching.
  • Bug fixes:
  • grep no longer mishandles patterns that contain \w or \W in multibyte locales.
  • grep would fail to count newlines internally when operating in non-UTF8 multibyte locales, leading it to print potentially many lines that did not match. E.g., the command, "seq 10 | env LC_ALL=zh_CN src/grep -n .." would print this: 1:1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 implying that the match, "10" was on line 1. [bug introduced in grep-2.19]
  • grep -F -x -o no longer prints an extra newline for each match. [bug introduced in grep-2.19]
  • grep in a non-UTF8 multibyte locale could mistakenly match in the middle of a multibyte character when using a '^'-anchored alternate in a pattern, leading it to print non-matching lines. [bug present since "the beginning"]
  • grep -F Y no longer fails to match in non-UTF8 multibyte locales like Shift-JIS, when the input contains a 2-byte character, XY, followed by the single-byte search pattern, Y. grep would find the first, middle- of-multibyte matching "Y", and then mistakenly advance an internal pointer one byte too far, skipping over the target "Y" just after that. [bug introduced in grep-2.19]
  • grep -E rejected unmatched ')', instead of treating it like '\)'. [bug present since "the beginning"]
  • On NetBSD, grep -r no longer reports "Inappropriate file type or format" when refusing to follow a symbolic link. [bug introduced in grep-2.12]
  • Changes in behavior:
  • The GREP_OPTIONS environment variable is now obsolescent, and grep now warns if it is used. Please use an alias or script instead.
  • In locales with multibyte character encodings other than UTF-8, grep -P now reports an error and exits instead of misbehaving.
  • When searching binary data, grep now may treat non-text bytes as line terminators. This can boost performance significantly.
  • grep -z no longer automatically treats the byte '\200' as binary data.

New in Grep 2.20 (Sep 10, 2014)

  • Bug fixes:
  • grep --max-count=N FILE would no longer stop reading after the Nth match. I.e., while grep would still print the correct output, it would continue reading until end of input, and hence, potentially forever. [bug introduced in grep-2.19]
  • A command like echo aa|grep -E 'a(b$|c$)' would mistakenly report the input as a matched line. [bug introduced in grep-2.19]
  • Changes in behavior:
  • grep --exclude-dir='FOO/' now excludes the directory FOO. Previously, the trailing slash meant the option was ineffective.