[Bug 1547466] Re: grep switches into binary mode while processing a text file

[Martin Pitt]

I tried to backport
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/commit/?id=b7bc3c1a4 ; this
by itself does not apply as this changes the files lib/hard-locale.[ch]
(which aren't present at all in grep 2.24) and also has a lot of changes
to files that aren't contained in grep. I got a backport now, but this
still does not fix the bug.

I spent some half an hour making this work, but the longer I do this the
less I have faith in the result. Therefore my recommendation is to drop
this hackery-patchery and just upgrade xenial to grep 2.25 instead. The
complete changelog is:

** Bug fixes

  In the C or POSIX locale, grep now treats all bytes as valid
  characters even if the C runtime library says otherwise.  The
  revised behavior is more compatible with the original intent of
  POSIX, and the next release of POSIX will likely make this official.
  [bug introduced in grep-2.23]

  grep -Pz no longer mistakenly diagnoses patterns like [^a] that use
  negated character classes. [bug introduced in grep-2.24]

  grep -oz now uses null bytes, not newlines, to terminate output lines.
  [bug introduced in grep-2.5]

** Improvements

  grep now outputs details more consistently when reporting a write error.
  E.g., "grep: write error: No space left on device" rather than just
  "grep: write error".

(the first item is the fix for this bug). The other bug fixes are
desirable for xenial as well, and the improvement seems harmless (and
nice) enough to include it too.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1547466

Title:
  grep switches into binary mode while processing a text file

Status in grep package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released
Status in grep source package in Xenial:
  In Progress
Status in grep source package in Yakkety:
  Fix Released
Status in grep package in Debian:
  Unknown

Bug description:
  I noticed this staring to happen in Xenial about two days ago. When
  running sbuild (or now the buildd, too), the build breaks when trying
  to compile a generated file. I traced the problem down to grep
  suddenly acting weird. When not having any language set (or a non-UTF8
  mode) it will start printing some lines of a source file and then
  suddenly end that by printing "Binary file ... matches".

  With the attached file, the difference can be observed (running
  Xenial):

  LANG=C grep -v xxx grant_table.h

  and

  LANG=C.UTF-8 grep -v xxx grant_table.h

  SRU INFORMATION
  ===============
  Upstream fixes:
   - http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/grep.git/commit/?id=d8a366218 (but depends on previous patches and is not sufficient by itself)
   - http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/grep.git/commit/?id=d8a366218 (tests+doc)

  Test case:

  Call grep on a file or a string with non-ASCII characters in the C locale:
      $ echo 'héll☺ ≥x' | LC_ALL=C grep . 
  In xenial this just shows "Binary file (standard input) matches", with the fix it should show the actual input string (with some garbled output of course as the UTF-8 chars cannot be displayed in C)

  Regression potential: grep is being used in tons of places; during
  xenial we had to fix/put a "use grep -a" workaround into a lot of
  packages to fix the fallout from grep 2.23 which introduced this. That
  said, as a result of "Binary file matches" does not give any more
  information than the actual string match, and scripts which get along
  with this answer most likely just check the exit code anyway (which
  does not change), the risk is bearable.

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