How to grep a text file which contains some binary data?

Question

grep returns

Binary file test.log matches

For example

echo    \"line1 re \\x00\\r\\nline2\\r\\nline3 re\\r\\n\" > test.log  # in zsh         


        

Answer 1

Starting with Grep 2.21, binary files are treated differently:

When searching binary data, grep now may treat non-text bytes as line terminators. This can boost performance significantly.

So what happens now is that with binary data, all non-text bytes (including newlines) are treated as line terminators. If you want to change this behavior, you can:

• use --text. This will ensure that only newlines are line terminators

• use --null-data. This will ensure that only null bytes are line terminators