1 GNU grep NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 Searching a directory with at least 100,000 entries no longer fails
8 with "Operation not supported" and exit status 2. Now, this prints 1
9 and no diagnostic, as expected:
10 $ mkdir t && cd t && seq 100000|xargs touch && grep -r x .; echo $?
12 [bug introduced in grep 3.11]
14 -mN where 1 < N no longer mistakenly lseeks to end of input merely
15 because standard output is /dev/null.
17 ** Changes in behavior
19 On Windows platforms and on AIX in 32-bit mode, grep now supports
20 Unicode characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane.
23 * Noteworthy changes in release 3.11 (2023-05-13) [stable]
27 With -P, patterns like [\d] now work again. Fixing this has caused
28 grep to revert to the behavior of grep 3.8, in that patterns like \w
29 and \b go back to using ASCII rather than Unicode interpretations.
30 However, future versions of GNU grep and/or PCRE2 are likely to fix
31 this and change the behavior of \w and \b back to Unicode again,
32 without breaking [\d] as 3.10 did.
33 [bug introduced in grep 3.10]
35 grep no longer fails on files dated after the year 2038,
36 when running on 32-bit x86 and ARM hosts using glibc 2.34+.
37 [bug introduced in grep 3.9]
39 grep -P no longer fails to match patterns using negated classes
40 like \D or \W when linked with PCRE2 10.34 or newer.
41 [bug introduced in grep 3.8]
44 ** Changes in behavior
46 grep --version now prints a line describing the version of PCRE2 it uses.
47 For example, it prints this when built with the very latest from git:
48 grep -P uses PCRE2 10.43-DEV 2023-04-14
49 or this with what's currently available in Fedora 37:
50 grep -P uses PCRE2 10.40 2022-04-14
52 previous versions of grep wouldn't respect the user provided settings for
53 PCRE_CFLAGS and PCRE_LIBS when building if a libpcre2-8 pkg-config module
57 * Noteworthy changes in release 3.10 (2023-03-22) [stable]
61 With -P, \d now matches only ASCII digits, regardless of PCRE
62 options/modes. The changes in grep-3.9 to make \b and \w work
63 properly had the undesirable side effect of making \d also match
64 e.g., the Arabic digits: ٠١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩. With grep-3.9, -P '\d+'
65 would match that ten-digit (20-byte) string. Now, to match such
66 a digit, you would use \p{Nd}. Similarly, \D is now mapped to [^0-9].
67 [bug introduced in grep 3.9]
70 * Noteworthy changes in release 3.9 (2023-03-05) [stable]
74 With -P, some non-ASCII UTF8 characters were not recognized as
75 word-constituent due to our omission of the PCRE2_UCP flag. E.g.,
76 given f(){ echo Perú|LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 grep -Po "$1"; } and
77 this command, echo $(f 'r\w'):$(f '.\b'), before it would print ":r".
78 After the fix, it prints the correct results: "rú:ú".
80 When given multiple patterns the last of which has a back-reference,
81 grep no longer sometimes mistakenly matches lines in some cases.
82 [Bug#36148#13 introduced in grep 3.4]
85 * Noteworthy changes in release 3.8 (2022-09-02) [stable]
87 ** Changes in behavior
89 The -P option is now based on PCRE2 instead of the older PCRE,
90 thanks to code contributed by Carlo Arenas.
92 The egrep and fgrep commands, which have been deprecated since
93 release 2.5.3 (2007), now warn that they are obsolescent and should
94 be replaced by grep -E and grep -F.
96 The confusing GREP_COLOR environment variable is now obsolescent.
97 Instead of GREP_COLOR='xxx', use GREP_COLORS='mt=xxx'. grep now
98 warns if GREP_COLOR is used and is not overridden by GREP_COLORS.
99 Also, grep now treats GREP_COLOR like GREP_COLORS by silently
100 ignoring it if it attempts to inject ANSI terminal escapes.
102 Regular expressions with stray backslashes now cause warnings, as
103 their unspecified behavior can lead to unexpected results.
104 For example, '\a' and 'a' are not always equivalent
105 <https://bugs.gnu.org/39678>. Similarly, regular expressions or
106 subexpressions that start with a repetition operator now also cause
107 warnings due to their unspecified behavior; for example, *a(+b|{1}c)
108 now has three reasons to warn. The warnings are intended as a
109 transition aid; they are likely to be errors in future releases.
111 Regular expressions like [:space:] are now errors even if
112 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, since POSIX now allows the GNU behavior.
116 In locales using UTF-8 encoding, the regular expression '.' no
117 longer sometimes fails to match Unicode characters U+D400 through
118 U+D7FF (some Hangul Syllables, and Hangul Jamo Extended-B) and
119 Unicode characters U+108000 through U+10FFFF (half of Supplemental
120 Private Use Area plane B).
121 [bug introduced in grep 3.4]
123 The -s option no longer suppresses "binary file matches" messages.
124 [Bug#51860 introduced in grep 3.5]
126 ** Documentation improvements
128 The manual now covers unspecified behavior in patterns like \x, (+),
129 and range expressions outside the POSIX locale.
132 * Noteworthy changes in release 3.7 (2021-08-14) [stable]
134 ** Changes in behavior
136 Use of the --unix-byte-offsets (-u) option now evokes a warning.
137 Since 3.1, this Windows-only option has had no effect.
141 Preprocessing N patterns would take at least O(N^2) time when too many
142 patterns hashed to too few buckets. This now takes seconds, not days:
143 : | grep -Ff <(seq 6400000 | tr 0-9 A-J)
144 [Bug#44754 introduced in grep 3.5]
147 * Noteworthy changes in release 3.6 (2020-11-08) [stable]
149 ** Changes in behavior
151 The GREP_OPTIONS environment variable no longer affects grep's behavior.
152 The variable was declared obsolescent in grep 2.21 (2014), and since
153 then any use had caused grep to issue a diagnostic.
157 grep's DFA matcher performed an invalid regex transformation
158 that would convert an ERE like a+a+a+ to a+a+, which would make
159 grep a+a+a+ mistakenly match "aa".
160 [Bug#44351 introduced in grep 3.2]
162 grep -P now reports the troublesome input filename upon PCRE execution
163 failure. Before, searching many files for something rare might fail with
164 just "exceeded PCRE's backtracking limit". Now, it also reports which file
165 triggered the failure.
168 * Noteworthy changes in release 3.5 (2020-09-27) [stable]
170 ** Changes in behavior
172 The message that a binary file matches is now sent to standard error
173 and the message has been reworded from "Binary file FOO matches" to
174 "grep: FOO: binary file matches", to avoid confusion with ordinary
175 output or when file names contain spaces and the like, and to be
176 more consistent with other diagnostics. For example, commands
177 like 'grep PATTERN FILE | wc' no longer add 1 to the count of
178 matching text lines due to the presence of the message. Like other
179 stderr messages, the message is now omitted if the --no-messages
180 (-s) option is given.
182 Two other stderr messages now use the typical form too. They are
183 now "grep: FOO: warning: recursive directory loop" and "grep: FOO:
184 input file is also the output".
186 The --files-without-match (-L) option has reverted to its behavior
187 in grep 3.1 and earlier. That is, grep -L again succeeds when a
188 line is selected, not when a file is listed. The behavior in grep
189 3.2 through 3.4 was causing compatibility problems.
193 grep -I no longer issues a spurious "Binary file FOO matches" line.
194 [Bug#33552 introduced in grep 2.23]
196 In UTF-8 locales, grep -w no longer ignores a multibyte word
197 constituent just before what would otherwise be a word match.
198 [Bug#43225 introduced in grep 2.28]
200 grep -i no longer mishandles ASCII characters that match multibyte
201 characters. For example, 'LC_ALL=tr_TR.utf8 grep -i i' no longer
202 dumps core merely because 'i' matches 'İ' (U+0130 LATIN CAPITAL
203 LETTER I WITH DOT ABOVE) in Turkish when ignoring case.
204 [Bug#43577 introduced partly in grep 2.28 and partly in grep 3.4]
206 A performance regression with -E and many patterns has been mostly fixed.
207 "Mostly" as there is a performance tradeoff between Bug#22357 and Bug#40634.
208 [Bug#40634 introduced in grep 2.28]
210 A performance regression with many duplicate patterns has been fixed.
211 [Bug#43040 introduced in grep 3.4]
213 An N^2 RSS performance regression with many patterns has been fixed
214 in common cases (no backref, and no use of -o or --color).
215 With only 80,000 lines of /usr/share/dict/linux.words, the following
216 would use 100GB of RSS and take 3 minutes. With the fix, it used less
217 than 400MB and took less than one second:
218 head -80000 /usr/share/dict/linux.words > w; grep -vf w w
219 [Bug#43527 introduced in grep 3.4]
223 "make dist" builds .tar.gz files again, as they are still used in
224 some barebones builds.
227 * Noteworthy changes in release 3.4 (2020-01-02) [stable]
231 The new --no-ignore-case option causes grep to observe case
232 distinctions, overriding any previous -i (--ignore-case) option.
236 '.' no longer matches some invalid byte sequences in UTF-8 locales.
237 [bug introduced in grep 2.7]
239 grep -Fw can no longer false match in non-UTF-8 multibyte locales
240 For example, this command would erroneously print its input line:
241 echo ab | LC_CTYPE=ja_JP.eucjp grep -Fw b
242 [Bug#38223 introduced in grep 2.28]
244 The exit status of 'grep -L' is no longer incorrect when standard
246 [Bug#37716 introduced in grep 3.2]
248 A performance bug has been fixed when grep is given many patterns,
249 each with no back-reference.
250 [Bug#33249 introduced in grep 2.5]
252 A performance bug has been fixed for patterns like '01.2' that
253 cause grep to reorder tokens internally.
254 [Bug#34951 introduced in grep 3.2]
258 The build procedure no longer relies on any already-built src/grep
259 that might be absent or broken. Instead, it uses the system 'grep'
260 to bootstrap, and uses src/grep only to test the build. On Solaris
261 /usr/bin/grep is broken, but you can install GNU or XPG4 'grep' from
262 the standard Solaris distribution before building GNU Grep yourself.
263 [bug introduced in grep 2.8]
266 * Noteworthy changes in release 3.3 (2018-12-20) [stable]
270 Some uses of \b in the C locale and with the DFA matcher would fail, e.g.,
271 the following would print nothing (it should print the input line):
272 echo 123-x|LC_ALL=C grep '.\bx'
273 Using a multibyte locale, using certain regexp constructs (some ranges,
274 back-references), or forcing use of the PCRE matcher via --perl-regexp (-P)
276 [bug introduced in grep 3.2]
279 * Noteworthy changes in release 3.2 (2018-12-20) [stable]
281 ** Changes in behavior
283 The --files-without-match (-L) option now causes grep to succeed
284 when a file is listed, instead of when a line is selected. This
285 resembles what git-grep does.
289 The --recursive (-r) option no longer fails on MS-Windows.
290 [bug introduced in grep 2.11]
294 An over-30x performance improvement when many 'or'd expressions
295 share a common prefix, thanks to improvements in gnulib's dfa.c,
296 by Norihiro Tanaka. See gnulib commits v0.1-2110-ge648401be,
297 v0.1-2111-g4299106ce, v0.1-2117-g617a60974
299 An additional 3-23% speed-up when searching large files, via
300 increased initial buffer size.
302 grep now diagnoses stack overflow. Before grep-2.6, the included
303 regexp code would detect it. Since 2.6, grep defaulted to using
304 glibc's regexp, which lost that capability.
307 * Noteworthy changes in release 3.1 (2017-07-02) [stable]
311 grep '[0-9]' is now just as fast as grep '[[:digit:]]' when run
312 in a multi-byte locale. Before, it was several times slower.
314 ** Changes in behavior
316 Context no longer excludes selected lines omitted because of -m.
317 For example, 'grep "^" -m1 -A1' now outputs the first two input
318 lines, not just the first line. This fixes a glitch that has been
319 present since -m was added in grep 2.5.
321 The following changes affect only MS-Windows platforms. First, the
322 --binary (-U) option now governs whether binary I/O is used, instead
323 of a heuristic that was sometimes incorrect. Second, the
324 --unix-byte-offsets (-u) option now has no effect on MS-Windows too.
327 * Noteworthy changes in release 3.0 (2017-02-09) [stable]
331 grep without -F no longer goes awry when given two or more patterns
332 that contain no special characters other than '\' and also contain a
333 subpattern like '\.' that escapes a character to make it ordinary.
334 [bug introduced in grep 2.28]
336 grep no longer fails to build on PCRE versions before 8.20.
337 [bug introduced in grep 2.28]
340 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.28 (2017-02-06) [stable]
344 When grep -Fo finds matches of differing length, it could
345 mistakenly print a shorter one. Now it prints a longest one.
346 [bug introduced in grep-2.26]
348 When standard output is /dev/null, grep no longer fails when
349 standard input is a file in the Linux /proc file system, or when
350 standard input is a pipe and standard output is in append mode.
351 [bugs introduced in grep-2.27]
353 Fix performance regression with multiple patterns, e.g., for -Fi in
354 a multi-byte locale, or for -Fw in a single-byte locale.
355 [bugs introduced in grep-2.19, grep-2.22 and grep-2.26]
359 Improve performance for -E or -G pattern lists that are easily
360 converted to -F format.
363 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.27 (2016-12-06) [stable]
367 grep no longer reports a false match in a multibyte, non-UTF8 locale
368 like zh_CN.gb18030, with a regular expression like ".*7" that just
369 happens to match the 4-byte representation of gb18030's \uC9, the
370 final byte of which is the digit "7".
371 [bug introduced in grep-2.19]
373 Unless an early-exit option like -q, -l, -L, -m, or -f /dev/null is
374 specified, grep now reads all of a non-seekable standard input,
375 even if this cannot affect grep's output or exit status. This works
376 better with nonportable scripts that run "PROGRAM | grep PATTERN
377 >/dev/null" where PROGRAM dies when writing into a broken pipe.
378 [bug introduced in grep-2.26]
380 grep no longer mishandles ranges in nontrivial unibyte locales.
381 [bug introduced in grep-2.26]
383 grep -P no longer attempts multiline matches. This works more
384 intuitively with unusual patterns, and means that grep -Pz no longer
385 rejects patterns containing ^ and $ and works when combined with -x.
386 [bugs introduced in grep-2.23] A downside is that grep -P is now
387 significantly slower, albeit typically still faster than pcregrep.
389 grep -m0 -L PAT FILE now outputs "FILE". [bug introduced in grep-2.5]
391 To output ':' and tab-align the following character C, grep -T no
392 longer outputs tab-backspace-':'-C, an approach that has problems if
393 run inside an Emacs shell window. [bug introduced in grep-2.5.2]
395 grep -T now uses worst-case widths of line numbers and byte offsets
396 instead of guessing widths that might not work with larger files.
397 [bug introduced in grep-2.5.2]
399 grep's use of getprogname no longer causes a build failure on HP-UX.
403 grep no longer reads the input in a few more cases when it is easy
404 to see that matching cannot succeed, e.g., 'grep -f /dev/null'.
407 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.26 (2016-10-02) [stable]
411 Grep no longer omits output merely because it follows an output line
412 suppressed due to encoding errors. [bug introduced in grep-2.21]
414 In the Shift_JIS locale, grep no longer mistakenly matches in the
415 middle of a multibyte character. [bug present since "the beginning"]
419 grep can be much faster now when standard output is /dev/null.
421 grep -F is now typically much faster when many patterns are given,
422 as it now uses the Aho-Corasick algorithm instead of the
423 Commentz-Walter algorithm in that case.
425 grep -iF is typically much faster in a multibyte locale, if the
426 pattern and its case counterparts contain only single byte characters.
428 grep with complicated expressions (e.g., back-references) and without
429 -i now uses the regex fastmap for better performance.
431 In multibyte locales, grep now handles leading "." in patterns more
434 grep now prints a "FILENAME:LINENO: " prefix when diagnosing an
435 invalid regular expression that was read from an '-f'-specified file.
438 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.25 (2016-04-21) [stable]
442 In the C or POSIX locale, grep now treats all bytes as valid
443 characters even if the C runtime library says otherwise. The
444 revised behavior is more compatible with the original intent of
445 POSIX, and the next release of POSIX will likely make this official.
446 [bug introduced in grep-2.23]
448 grep -Pz no longer mistakenly diagnoses patterns like [^a] that use
449 negated character classes. [bug introduced in grep-2.24]
451 grep -oz now uses null bytes, not newlines, to terminate output lines.
452 [bug introduced in grep-2.5]
456 grep now outputs details more consistently when reporting a write error.
457 E.g., "grep: write error: No space left on device" rather than just
461 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.24 (2016-03-10) [stable]
465 grep -z would match strings it should not. To trigger the bug, you'd
466 have to use a regular expression including an anchor (^ or $) and a
467 feature like a range or a back-reference, causing grep to forego its DFA
468 matcher and resort to using re_search. With a multibyte locale, that
469 matcher could mistakenly match a string containing a newline.
470 For example, this command:
471 printf 'a\nb\0' | LC_ALL=en_US.utf-8 grep -z '^[a-b]*b'
472 would mistakenly match and print all four input bytes. After the fix,
473 there is no match, as expected.
474 [bug introduced in grep-2.7]
476 grep -Pz now diagnoses attempts to use patterns containing ^ and $,
477 instead of mishandling these patterns. This problem seems to be
478 inherent to the PCRE API; removing this limitation is on PCRE's
479 maint/README wish list. Patterns can continue to match literal ^
480 and $ by escaping them with \ (now needed even inside [...]).
481 [bug introduced in grep-2.5]
484 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.23 (2016-02-04) [stable]
488 Binary files are now less likely to generate diagnostics and more
489 likely to yield text matches. grep now reports "Binary file FOO
490 matches" and suppresses further output instead of outputting a line
491 containing an encoding error; hence grep can now report matching text
492 before a later binary match. Formerly, grep reported FOO to be
493 binary when it found an encoding error in FOO before generating
494 output for FOO, which meant it never reported both matching text and
495 matching binary data; this was less useful for searching text
496 containing encoding errors in non-matching lines.
497 [bug introduced in grep-2.21]
499 grep -c no longer stops counting when finding binary data.
500 [bug introduced in grep-2.21]
502 grep no longer outputs encoding errors in unibyte locales.
503 For example, if the byte '\x81' is not a valid character in a
504 unibyte locale, grep treats the byte as binary data.
505 [bug introduced in grep-2.21]
507 grep -oP is no longer susceptible to an infinite loop when processing
508 invalid UTF8 just before a match.
509 [bug introduced in grep-2.22]
511 --exclude and related options are now matched against trailing
512 parts of command-line arguments, not against the entire arguments.
513 This partly reverts the --exclude-related change in 2.22.
514 [bug introduced in grep-2.22]
516 --line-buffer is no longer ineffective when combined with -l.
517 [bug introduced in grep-2.5]
519 -xw is now equivalent to -x more consistently, with -P and with backrefs.
520 [bug only partially fixed in grep-2.19]
523 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.22 (2015-11-01) [stable]
527 Performance has improved for patterns containing very long strings,
528 reducing preprocessing time for an N-byte regexp from O(N^2) to
529 only slightly superlinear for most patterns. Before, a command like
530 the following would take over a minute, but now, it takes less than
532 : | grep -f <(seq -s '' 99999)
534 When building grep, 'configure' now uses PCRE's pkg-config module for
535 configuration information, rather than attempting to guess it by hand.
539 A DFA matcher bug made this command mistakenly print its input line:
540 echo axb | grep -E '^x|x$'
541 Likewise for this equivalent command:
542 echo axb | grep -e '^x' -e 'x$'
543 [bug introduced in grep-2.19 ]
545 grep no longer reads from uninitialized memory or from beyond the end
546 of the heap-allocated input buffer. This fix addressed CVE-2015-1345.
547 [bug introduced in grep-2.19 ]
549 With -z, '.' and '[^x]' in a pattern now consistently match newline.
550 Previously, they sometimes matched newline, and sometimes did not.
551 [bug introduced in grep-2.4]
553 When the JIT stack is exhausted, grep -P now grows the stack rather
554 than reporting an internal PCRE error.
556 'grep -D skip PATTERN FILE' no longer hangs if FILE is a fifo.
557 [bug introduced in grep-2.12]
559 --exclude and related options are now matched against entire
560 command-line arguments, not against command-line components.
561 [bug introduced in grep-2.6]
563 Fix performance degradation of grep -Fw in unibyte locales.
564 [bug introduced in grep-2.19 ]
567 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.21 (2014-11-23) [stable]
571 Performance has been greatly improved for searching files containing
572 holes, on platforms where lseek's SEEK_DATA flag works efficiently.
574 Performance has improved for rejecting data that cannot match even
575 the first part of a nontrivial pattern.
577 Performance has improved for very long strings in patterns.
579 If a file contains data improperly encoded for the current locale,
580 and this is discovered before any of the file's contents are output,
581 grep now treats the file as binary.
583 grep -P no longer reports an error and exits when given invalid UTF-8 data.
584 Instead, it considers the data to be non-matching.
588 grep no longer mishandles patterns that contain \w or \W in multibyte
591 grep would fail to count newlines internally when operating in non-UTF8
592 multibyte locales, leading it to print potentially many lines that did
593 not match. E.g., the command, "seq 10 | env LC_ALL=zh_CN src/grep -n .."
605 implying that the match, "10" was on line 1.
606 [bug introduced in grep-2.19]
608 grep -F -x -o no longer prints an extra newline for each match.
609 [bug introduced in grep-2.19]
611 grep in a non-UTF8 multibyte locale could mistakenly match in the middle
612 of a multibyte character when using a '^'-anchored alternate in a pattern,
613 leading it to print non-matching lines. [bug present since "the beginning"]
615 grep -F Y no longer fails to match in non-UTF8 multibyte locales like
616 Shift-JIS, when the input contains a 2-byte character, XY, followed by
617 the single-byte search pattern, Y. grep would find the first, middle-
618 of-multibyte matching "Y", and then mistakenly advance an internal
619 pointer one byte too far, skipping over the target "Y" just after that.
620 [bug introduced in grep-2.19]
622 grep -E rejected unmatched ')', instead of treating it like '\)'.
623 [bug present since "the beginning"]
625 On NetBSD, grep -r no longer reports "Inappropriate file type or format"
626 when refusing to follow a symbolic link.
627 [bug introduced in grep-2.12]
629 ** Changes in behavior
631 The GREP_OPTIONS environment variable is now obsolescent, and grep
632 now warns if it is used. Please use an alias or script instead.
634 In locales with multibyte character encodings other than UTF-8,
635 grep -P now reports an error and exits instead of misbehaving.
637 When searching binary data, grep now may treat non-text bytes as
638 line terminators. This can boost performance significantly.
640 grep -z no longer automatically treats the byte '\200' as binary data.
642 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.20 (2014-06-03) [stable]
646 grep --max-count=N FILE would no longer stop reading after the Nth match.
647 I.e., while grep would still print the correct output, it would continue
648 reading until end of input, and hence, potentially forever.
649 [bug introduced in grep-2.19]
651 A command like echo aa|grep -E 'a(b$|c$)' would mistakenly
652 report the input as a matched line.
653 [bug introduced in grep-2.19]
655 ** Changes in behavior
657 grep --exclude-dir='FOO/' now excludes the directory FOO.
658 Previously, the trailing slash meant the option was ineffective.
661 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.19 (2014-05-22) [stable]
665 Performance has improved, typically by 10% and in some cases by a
666 factor of 200. However, performance of grep -P in UTF-8 locales has
667 gotten worse as part of the fix for the crashes mentioned below.
671 grep no longer mishandles patterns like [a-[.z.]], and no longer
672 mishandles patterns like [^a] in locales that have multicharacter
673 collating sequences so that [^a] can match a string of two characters.
675 grep no longer mishandles an empty pattern at the end of a pattern list.
676 [bug introduced in grep-2.5]
678 grep -C NUM now outputs separators consistently even when NUM is zero,
679 and similarly for grep -A NUM and grep -B NUM.
680 [bug present since "the beginning"]
682 grep -f no longer mishandles patterns containing NUL bytes.
683 [bug introduced in grep-2.11]
685 Plain grep, grep -E, and grep -F now treat encoding errors in patterns
686 the same way the GNU regular expression matcher treats them, with respect
687 to whether the errors can match parts of multibyte characters in data.
688 [bug present since "the beginning"]
690 grep -w no longer mishandles a potential match adjacent to a letter that
691 takes up two or more bytes in a multibyte encoding.
692 Similarly, the patterns '\<', '\>', '\b', and '\B' no longer
693 mishandle word-boundary matches in multibyte locales.
694 [bug present since "the beginning"]
696 grep -P now reports an error and exits when given invalid UTF-8 data.
697 Previously it was unreliable, and sometimes crashed or looped.
698 [bug introduced in grep-2.16]
700 grep -P now works with -w and -x and back-references. Before,
701 echo aa|grep -Pw '(.)\1' would fail to match, yet
702 echo aa|grep -Pw '(.)\2' would match.
704 grep -Pw now works like grep -w in that the matched string has to be
705 preceded and followed by non-word components or the beginning and end
706 of the line (as opposed to word boundaries before). Before, this
707 echo a@@a| grep -Pw @@ would match, yet this
708 echo a@@a| grep -w @@ would not. Now, they both fail to match,
709 per the documentation on how grep's -w works.
711 grep -i no longer mishandles patterns containing titlecase characters.
712 For example, in a locale containing the titlecase character
713 'Lj' (U+01C8 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L WITH SMALL LETTER J),
714 'grep -i Lj' now matches both 'LJ' (U+01C7 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER LJ)
715 and 'lj' (U+01C9 LATIN SMALL LETTER LJ).
718 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.18 (2014-02-20) [stable]
722 grep no longer mishandles patterns like [^^-~] in unibyte locales.
723 [bug introduced in grep-2.8]
725 grep -i in a multibyte, non-UTF8 locale could be up to 200 times slower
726 than in 2.16. [bug introduced in grep-2.17]
729 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.17 (2014-02-17) [stable]
733 grep -i in a multibyte locale is now typically 10 times faster
734 for patterns that do not contain \ or [.
736 grep (without -i) in a multibyte locale is now up to 7 times faster
737 when processing many matched lines.
741 grep's --mmap option was disabled in March of 2010, and began to
742 elicit a warning in January of 2012. Now it is completely gone.
745 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.16 (2014-01-01) [stable]
749 Fix gnulib-provided maint.mk so that the release procedure described
750 in README-release actually does what we want. Before that fix, that
751 procedure resulted in a grep-2.15 tarball that would lead to a grep
752 binary whose --version-reported version number was 2.14.51...
754 The fix to make \s and \S work with multi-byte white space broke
755 the use of each shortcut whenever followed by a repetition operator.
756 For example, \s*, \s+, \s? and \s{3} would all malfunction in a
757 multi-byte locale. [bug introduced in grep-2.15]
759 The fix to make grep -P work better with UTF-8 made it possible for
760 grep to evoke a larger set of PCRE errors, some of which could trigger
761 an abort. E.g., this would abort:
762 printf '\x82'|LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 grep -P y
763 Now grep handles arbitrary PCRE errors. [bug introduced in grep-2.15]
765 Handle very long lines (2GiB and longer) on systems with a deficient
768 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.15 (2013-10-26) [stable]
772 grep's \s and \S failed to work with multi-byte white space characters.
773 For example, \s would fail to match a non-breaking space, and this
774 would print nothing: printf '\xc2\xa0' | LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 grep '\s'
775 A related bug is that \S would mistakenly match an invalid multibyte
776 character. For example, the following would match:
777 printf '\x82\n' | LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 grep '^\S$'
778 [bug present since grep-2.6]
780 grep -i would segfault on systems using UTF-16-based wchar_t (Cygwin)
781 when converting an input string containing certain 4-byte UTF-8
782 sequences to lower case. The conversions to wchar_t and back to
783 a UTF-8 multibyte string did not take surrogate pairs into account.
784 [bug present since at least grep-2.6, though the segfault is new with 2.13]
786 grep -E would segfault when given a regexp like '([^.]*[M]){1,2}'
787 for any multibyte character M. [bug introduced in grep-2.6, which would
788 segfault, but 2.7 and 2.8 had no problem, and 2.9 through 2.14 would
789 hit a failed assertion. ]
791 grep -F would get stuck in an infinite loop when given a search string
792 that is an invalid byte sequence in the current locale and that matches
793 the bytes of the input twice on a line. Now grep fails with exit status 1.
795 grep -P could misbehave. While multi-byte mode is only supported by PCRE
796 with UTF-8 locales, grep did not activate it. This would cause failures
797 to match multibyte characters against some regular expressions, especially
798 those including the '.' or '\p' metacharacters.
802 grep -P can now use a just-in-time compiler to greatly speed up matches,
803 This feature is transparent to the user; no flag is required to enable
804 it. It is only available if the corresponding support in the PCRE
805 library is detected when grep is compiled.
808 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.14 (2012-08-20) [stable]
812 grep -i '^$' could exit 0 (i.e., report a match) in a multi-byte locale,
813 even though there was no match, and the command generated no output.
814 E.g., seq 2 | LC_ALL=en_US.utf8 grep -il '^$' would mistakenly print
815 "(standard input)". Related, seq 9 | LC_ALL=en_US.utf8 grep -in '^$'
816 would print "2:4:6:8:10:12:14:16" and exit 0. Now it prints nothing
817 and exits with status of 1. [bug introduced in grep-2.6]
819 'grep' no longer falsely reports text files as being binary on file
820 systems that compress contents or that store tiny contents in metadata.
823 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.13 (2012-07-04) [stable]
827 grep -i, in a multi-byte locale, when matching a line containing a character
828 like the UTF-8 Turkish I-with-dot (U+0130) (whose lower-case representation
829 occupies fewer bytes), would print an incomplete output line.
830 Similarly, with a matched line containing a character (e.g., the Latin
831 capital I in a Turkish UTF-8 locale), where the lower-case representation
832 occupies more bytes, grep could print garbage.
833 [bug introduced in grep-2.6]
835 --include and --exclude can again be combined, and again apply to
836 the command line, e.g., "grep --include='*.[ch]' --exclude='system.h'
837 PATTERN *" again reads all *.c and *.h files except for system.h.
838 [bug introduced in grep-2.6]
842 'grep' without -z now treats a sparse file as binary, if it can
843 easily determine that the file is sparse.
847 Bootstrapping with Makefile.boot has been broken since grep 2.6,
851 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.12 (2012-04-23) [stable]
855 "echo P|grep --devices=skip P" once again prints P, as it did in 2.10
856 [bug introduced in grep-2.11]
858 grep no longer segfaults with -r --exclude-dir and no file operand.
859 I.e., ":|grep -r --exclude-dir=D PAT" would segfault.
860 [bug introduced in grep-2.11]
862 Recursive grep now uses fts for directory traversal, so it can
863 handle much-larger directories without reporting things like "File
864 name too long", and it can run much faster when dealing with large
865 directory hierarchies. [bug present since the beginning]
867 grep -E 'a{1000000000}' now reports an overflow error rather than
868 silently acting like grep -E 'a\{1000000000}'.
870 grep -E 'a{,10}' was not treated equivalently to grep -E 'a{0,10}'.
874 The -R option now has a long-option alias --dereference-recursive.
876 ** Changes in behavior
878 The -r (--recursive) option now follows only command-line symlinks.
879 Also, by default -r now reads a device only if it is named on the command
880 line; this can be overridden with --devices. -R acts as before, so
881 use -R if you prefer the old behavior of following all symlinks and
882 defaulting to reading all devices.
885 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.11 (2012-03-02) [stable]
889 grep no longer dumps core on lines whose lengths do not fit in 'int'.
890 (e.g., lines longer than 2 GiB on a typical 64-bit host).
891 Instead, grep either works as expected, or reports an error.
892 An error can occur if not enough main memory is available, or if the
893 GNU C library's regular expression functions cannot handle such long lines.
894 [bug present since "the beginning"]
896 The -m, -A, -B, and -C options no longer mishandle context line
897 counts that do not fit in 'int'. Also, grep -c's counts are now
898 limited by the type 'intmax_t' (typically less than 2**63) rather
899 than 'int' (typically less than 2**31).
901 grep no longer silently suppresses errors when reading a directory
902 as if it were a text file. For example, "grep x ." now reports a
903 read error on most systems; formerly, it ignored the error.
904 [bug introduced in grep-2.5]
906 grep now exits with status 2 if a directory loop is found,
907 instead of possibly exiting with status 0 or 1.
908 [bug introduced in grep-2.3]
910 The -s option now suppresses certain input error diagnostics that it
911 formerly failed to suppress. These include errors when closing the
912 input, when lseeking the input, and when the input is also the output.
913 [bug introduced in grep-2.4]
915 On POSIX systems, commands like "grep PAT < FILE >> FILE"
916 now report an error instead of looping.
917 [bug present since "the beginning"]
919 The --include, --exclude, and --exclude-dir options now handle
920 command-line arguments more consistently. --include and --exclude
921 apply only to non-directories and --exclude-dir applies only to
922 directories. "-" (standard input) is never excluded, since it is
924 [bug introduced in grep-2.5]
926 grep no longer rejects "grep -qr . > out", i.e., when run with -q
927 and an input file is the same as the output file, since with -q
928 grep generates no output, so there is no risk of infinite loop or
929 of an output-affecting race condition. Thus, the use of the following
930 options also disables the input-equals-output failure:
931 --max-count=N (-m) (for N >= 2)
932 --files-with-matches (-l)
933 --files-without-match (-L)
934 [bug introduced in grep-2.10]
936 grep no longer emits an error message and quits on MS-Windows when
937 invoked with the -r option.
939 grep no longer misinterprets some alternations involving anchors
940 (^, $, \< \> \B, \b). For example, grep -E "(^|\B)a" no
941 longer reports a match for the string "x a".
942 [bug present since "the beginning"]
946 If no file operand is given, and a command-line -r or equivalent
947 option is given, grep now searches the working directory. Formerly
948 grep ignored the -r and searched standard input nonrecursively.
949 An -r found in GREP_OPTIONS does not have this new effect.
951 grep now supports color highlighting of matches on MS-Windows.
953 ** Changes in behavior
955 Use of the --mmap option now elicits a warning. It has been a no-op
958 grep no longer diagnoses write errors repeatedly; it exits after
959 diagnosing the first write error. This is better behavior when
960 writing to a dangling pipe.
962 Syntax errors in GREP_COLORS are now ignored, instead of sometimes
963 eliciting warnings. This is more consistent with programs that
964 (e.g.) ignore errors in termcap entries.
966 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.10 (2011-11-16) [stable]
970 grep no longer mishandles high-bit-set pattern bytes on systems
971 where "char" is a signed type. [bug appears to affect only MS-Windows]
973 On POSIX systems, grep now rejects a command like "grep -r pattern . > out",
974 in which the output file is also one of the inputs,
975 because it can result in an "infinite" disk-filling loop.
976 [bug present since "the beginning"]
980 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
981 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
982 only .tar.xz files is enough.
985 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.9 (2011-06-21) [stable]
989 grep no longer clobbers heap for an ERE like '(^| )*( |$)'
990 [bug introduced in grep-2.6]
992 grep is faster on regular expressions that match multibyte characters
993 in brackets (such as '[áéíóú]').
995 echo c|grep '[c]' would fail for any c in 0x80..0xff, with a uni-byte
996 encoding for which the byte-to-wide-char mapping is nontrivial. For
997 example, the ISO-88591 locales are not affected, but ru_RU.KOI8-R is.
998 [bug introduced in grep-2.6]
1000 grep -P no longer aborts when PCRE's backtracking limit is exceeded
1001 Before, echo aaaaaaaaaaaaaab |grep -P '((a+)*)+$' would abort. Now,
1002 it diagnoses the problem and exits with status 2.
1005 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.8 (2011-05-13) [stable]
1009 echo c|grep '[c]' would fail for any c in 0x80..0xff, and in many locales.
1010 E.g., printf '\xff\n'|grep "$(printf '[\xff]')" || echo FAIL
1011 would print FAIL rather than the required matching line.
1012 [bug introduced in grep-2.6]
1014 grep's interpretation of range expression is now more consistent with
1015 that of other tools. [bug present since multi-byte character set
1016 support was introduced in 2.5.2, though the steps needed to reproduce
1017 it changed in grep-2.6]
1019 grep erroneously returned with exit status 1 on some memory allocation
1020 failure. [bug present since "the beginning"]
1023 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.7 (2010-09-16) [stable]
1027 grep --include=FILE works once again, rather than working like --exclude=FILE
1028 [bug introduced in grep-2.6]
1030 Searching with grep -Fw for an empty string would not match an
1031 empty line. [bug present since "the beginning"]
1033 X{0,0} is implemented correctly. It used to be a synonym of X{0,1}.
1034 [bug present since "the beginning"]
1036 In multibyte locales, regular expressions including back-references
1037 no longer exhibit quadratic complexity (i.e., they are orders
1038 of magnitude faster). [bug present since multi-byte character set
1039 support was introduced in 2.5.2]
1041 In UTF-8 locales, regular expressions including "." can be orders
1042 of magnitude faster. For example, "grep ." is now twice as fast
1043 as "grep -v ^$", instead of being immensely slower. It remains
1044 slow in other multibyte locales. [bug present since multi-byte
1045 character set support was introduced in 2.5.2]
1047 --mmap was meant to be ignored in 2.6.x, but it was instead
1048 removed by mistake. [bug introduced in 2.6]
1052 grep now diagnoses (and fails with exit status 2) commonly mistyped
1053 regular expression like [:space:], [:digit:], etc. Before, those were
1054 silently interpreted as [ac:eps] and [dgit:] respectively. Virtually
1055 all who make that class of mistake should have used [[:space:]] or
1056 [[:digit:]]. This new behavior is disabled when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
1057 environment variable is set.
1059 On systems using glibc, grep can support equivalence classes. However,
1060 whether they actually work depends on glibc's locale definitions.
1062 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.6.3 (2010-04-02) [stable]
1066 Searching with grep -F for an empty string in a multibyte locale
1067 would hang grep. [bug introduced in 2.6.2]
1069 PCRE support is once again detected on systems with <pcre/pcre.h>
1070 [bug introduced in 2.6.2]
1073 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.6.2 (2010-03-29) [stable]
1077 grep -F no longer mistakenly reports a match when searching
1078 for an incomplete prefix of a multibyte character.
1079 [bug present since "the beginning"]
1081 grep -F no longer goes into an infinite loop when it finds a match for an
1082 incomplete (non-prefix of a) multibyte character. [bug introduced in 2.6]
1084 Using any of the --include or --exclude* options would cause a NULL
1085 dereference. [bugs introduced in 2.6]
1089 configure no longer relies on pkg-config to detect PCRE support.
1092 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.6.1 (2010-03-25) [stable]
1096 Character classes could cause a segmentation fault if they included a
1097 multibyte character. [bug introduced in 2.6]
1099 Character ranges would not work in single-byte character sets other
1100 than C (for example, ISO-8859-1 or KOI8-R) and some multi-byte locales.
1101 For example, this should print "1", but would find no match:
1102 $ echo 1 | env -i LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8 grep '[0-9]'
1103 [bug introduced in 2.6]
1105 The output of grep was incorrect for whole-word (-w) matches if the
1106 patterns included a back-reference. [bug introduced in grep-2.5.2]
1110 Avoid a link failure on Solaris 8.
1113 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.6 (2010-03-23) [stable]
1115 ** Speed improvements
1117 grep is much faster on multibyte character sets, especially (but not
1118 limited to) UTF-8 character sets. The speed improvement is also very
1119 pronounced with case-insensitive matches.
1123 Character classes would malfunction in multi-byte locales when using grep -i.
1124 Examples which would print nothing for LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 include:
1125 - for ranges, echo Z | grep -i '[a-z]'
1126 - for single characters, echo Y | grep -i '[y]'
1127 - for character types, echo Y | grep -i '[[:lower:]]'
1129 grep -i -o would fail to report some matches; grep -i --color, while not
1130 missing any line containing a match, would fail to color some matches.
1132 grep would fail to report a match in a multibyte character set other than
1133 UTF-8, if another match occurred earlier in the line but started in the
1134 middle of a multibyte character.
1136 Various bugs in grep -P, caused by expressions such as [^b] or \S matching
1137 newlines, were fixed. grep -P also supports the special sequences \Z and
1138 \z, and can be combined with the command-line option -z to perform searches
1139 on NUL-separated records.
1141 grep would mistakenly exit with status 1 upon error, rather than 2,
1142 as it is documented to do.
1144 Using options like -1 -2 or -1 -v -2 results in two lines of
1145 context (the last value that appears on the command line) instead
1146 twelve (the concatenation of all the values). This is consistent
1147 with the behavior of options -A/-B/-C.
1149 Two new command-line options, --group-separator=ARGUMENT and
1150 --no-group-separator, enable further customization of the output
1151 when -A, -B or -C is being used.
1155 egrep accepts the -E option and fgrep accepts the -F option. If egrep
1156 and fgrep are given another of the -E/-F/-G options, they print a more
1157 meaningful error message.
1159 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.5.4 (2009-02-10) [stable]
1161 - This is a bugfix release. No new features.
1164 - The new option --exclude-dir allows to specify a directory pattern that
1165 will be excluded from recursive grep.
1166 - Numerous bug fixes
1169 - This is a bugfix release. No new features.
1172 - The new option --label allows to specify a different name for input
1173 from stdin. See the man or info pages for details.
1175 - The internal lib/getopt* files are no longer used on systems providing
1176 getopt functionality in their libc (e.g. glibc 2.2.x).
1177 If you need the old getopt files, use --with-included-getopt.
1179 - The new option --only-matching (-o) will print only the part of matching
1180 lines that matches the pattern. This is useful, for example, to extract
1181 IP addresses from log files.
1183 - i18n bug fixed ([A-Z0-9] wouldn't match A in locales other than C on
1184 systems using recent glibc builds
1186 - GNU grep can now be built with autoconf 2.52.
1188 - The new option --devices controls how grep handles device files. Its usage
1189 is analogous to --directories.
1191 - The new option --line-buffered fflush on everyline. There is a noticeable
1192 slow down when forcing line buffering.
1194 - Back-references are now local to the regex.
1195 grep -e '\(a\)\1' -e '\(b\)\1'
1196 The last backref \1 in the second expression refer to \(b\)
1198 - The new option --include=PATTERN will search only matching files
1199 when recursing in directories
1201 - The new option --exclude=PATTERN will skip matching files when
1202 recursing in directories.
1204 - The new option --color will use the environment variable GREP_COLOR
1205 (default is red) to highlight the matching string.
1206 --color takes an optional argument specifying when to colorize a line:
1207 --color=always, --color=tty, --color=never
1209 - The following changes are for POSIX conformance:
1211 . The -q or --quiet or --silent option now causes grep to exit
1212 with zero status when a input line is selected, even if an error
1215 . The -s or --no-messages option no longer affects the exit status.
1217 . Bracket regular expressions like [a-z] are now locale-dependent.
1218 For example, many locales sort characters in dictionary order,
1219 and in these locales the regular expression [a-d] is not
1220 equivalent to [abcd]; it might be equivalent to [aBbCcDd], for
1221 example. To obtain the traditional interpretation of bracket
1222 expressions, you can use the C locale by setting the LC_ALL
1223 environment variable to the value "C".
1225 - The -C or --context option now requires an argument, partly for
1226 consistency, and partly because POSIX recommends against
1229 - The new -P or --perl-regexp option tells grep to interpret the pattern as
1230 a Perl regular expression.
1232 - The new option --max-count=num makes grep stop reading a file after num
1234 New option -m; equivalent to --max-count.
1236 - Translations for bg, ca, da, nb and tr have been added.
1240 - Added more check in configure to default the grep-${version}/src/regex.c
1241 instead of the one in GNU Lib C.
1245 - If the final byte of an input file is not a newline, grep now silently
1248 - The new option --binary-files=TYPE makes grep assume that a binary input
1249 file is of type TYPE.
1250 --binary-files='binary' (the default) outputs a 1-line summary of matches.
1251 --binary-files='without-match' assumes binary files do not match.
1252 --binary-files='text' treats binary files as text
1253 (equivalent to the -a or --text option).
1255 - New option -I; equivalent to --binary-files='without-match'.
1259 - egrep is now equivalent to 'grep -E' as required by POSIX,
1260 removing a longstanding source of confusion and incompatibility.
1261 'grep' is now more forgiving about stray '{'s, for backward
1262 compatibility with traditional egrep.
1264 - The lower bound of an interval is not optional.
1265 You must use an explicit zero, e.g. 'x{0,10}' instead of 'x{,10}'.
1266 (The old documentation incorrectly claimed that it was optional.)
1268 - The --revert-match option has been renamed to --invert-match.
1270 - The --fixed-regexp option has been renamed to --fixed-strings.
1272 - New option -H or --with-filename.
1274 - New option --mmap. By default, GNU grep now uses read instead of mmap.
1275 This is faster on some hosts, and is safer on all.
1277 - The new option -z or --null-data causes 'grep' to treat a zero byte
1278 (the ASCII NUL character) as a line terminator in input data, and
1279 to treat newlines as ordinary data.
1281 - The new option -Z or --null causes 'grep' to output a zero byte
1282 instead of the normal separator after a file name.
1284 - These two options can be used with commands like 'find -print0',
1285 'perl -0', 'sort -z', and 'xargs -0' to process arbitrary file names,
1286 even those that contain newlines.
1288 - The environment variable GREP_OPTIONS specifies default options;
1289 e.g. GREP_OPTIONS='--directories=skip' reestablishes grep 2.1's
1290 behavior of silently skipping directories.
1292 - You can specify a matcher multiple times without error, e.g.
1293 'grep -E -E' or 'fgrep -F'. It is still an error to specify
1294 conflicting matchers.
1296 - -u and -U are now allowed on non-DOS hosts, and have no effect.
1298 - Modifications of the tests scripts to go around the "Broken Pipe"
1299 errors from bash. See Bash FAQ.
1301 - New option -r or --recursive or --directories=recurse.
1302 (This option was also in grep 2.3, but wasn't announced here.)
1304 - --without-included-regex disable, was causing bogus reports .i.e
1305 doing more harm then good.
1309 - When searching a binary file FOO, grep now just reports
1310 "Binary file FOO matches" instead of outputting binary data.
1311 This is typically more useful than the old behavior,
1312 and it is also more consistent with other utilities like 'diff'.
1313 A file is considered to be binary if it contains a NUL (i.e. zero) byte.
1315 The new -a or --text option causes 'grep' to assume that all
1316 input is text. (This option has the same meaning as with 'diff'.)
1317 Use it if you want binary data in your output.
1319 - 'grep' now searches directories just like ordinary files; it no longer
1320 silently skips directories. This is the traditional behavior of
1321 Unix text utilities (in particular, of traditional 'grep').
1322 Hence 'grep PATTERN DIRECTORY' should report
1323 "grep: DIRECTORY: Is a directory" on hosts where the operating system
1324 does not permit programs to read directories directly, and
1325 "grep: DIRECTORY: Binary file matches" (or nothing) otherwise.
1327 The new -d ACTION or --directories=ACTION option affects directory handling.
1328 '-d skip' causes 'grep' to silently skip directories, as in grep 2.1;
1329 '-d read' (the default) causes 'grep' to read directories if possible,
1330 as in earlier versions of grep.
1332 - The MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows ports now behave identically to the
1333 GNU and Unix ports with respect to binary files and directories.
1339 - Status error number fix.
1340 - Skipping directories removed.
1342 - -f /dev/null fix(not to consider as an empty pattern).
1343 - Checks for wctype/wchar.
1344 - -E was using the wrong matcher fix.
1345 - bug in regex char class fix
1350 This is a bug fix release(see Changelog) i.e. no new features.
1352 - More compliance to GNU standard.
1354 - Internationalization.
1355 - Use automake/autoconf.
1356 - Directory hierarchy change.
1357 - Sigvec with -e on Linux corrected.
1358 - Sigvec with -f on Linux corrected.
1359 - Sigvec with the mmap() corrected.
1360 - Bug in kwset corrected.
1361 - -q, -L and -l stop on first match.
1362 - New and improve regex.[ch] from Ulrich Drepper.
1363 - New and improve dfa.[ch] from Arnold Robbins.
1364 - Prototypes for over zealous C compiler.
1365 - Not scanning a file, if it's a directory
1366 (cause problems on Sun).
1367 - Ported to MS-DOS/MS-Windows with DJGPP tools.
1369 See Changelog for the full story and proper credits.
1373 The most important user visible change is that egrep and fgrep have
1374 disappeared as separate programs into the single grep program mandated
1375 by POSIX 1003.2. New options -G, -E, and -F have been added,
1376 selecting grep, egrep, and fgrep behavior respectively. For
1377 compatibility with historical practice, hard links named egrep and
1378 fgrep are also provided. See the manual page for details.
1380 In addition, the regular expression facilities described in Posix
1381 draft 11.2 are now supported, except for internationalization features
1382 related to locale-dependent collating sequence information.
1384 There is a new option, -L, which is like -l except it lists
1385 files which don't contain matches. The reason this option was
1386 added is because '-l -v' doesn't do what you expect.
1388 Performance has been improved; the amount of improvement is platform
1389 dependent, but (for example) grep 2.0 typically runs at least 30% faster
1390 than grep 1.6 on a DECstation using the MIPS compiler. Where possible,
1391 grep now uses mmap() for file input; on a Sun 4 running SunOS 4.1 this
1392 may cut system time by as much as half, for a total reduction in running
1393 time by nearly 50%. On machines that don't use mmap(), the buffering
1394 code has been rewritten to choose more favorable alignments and buffer
1397 Portability has been substantially cleaned up, and an automatic
1398 configure script is now provided.
1400 The internals have changed in ways too numerous to mention.
1401 People brave enough to reuse the DFA matcher in other programs
1402 will now have their bravery amply "rewarded", for the interface
1403 to that file has been completely changed. Some changes were
1404 necessary to track the evolution of the regex package, and since
1405 I was changing it anyway I decided to do a general cleanup.
1407 ========================================================================
1408 Copyright (C) 1992, 1997-2002, 2004-2025 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
1410 Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification,
1411 are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright
1412 notice and this notice are preserved.
1414 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
1415 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
1416 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
1417 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
1418 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
1419 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.