GNU grep NEWS -*- outline -*-
* Noteworthy changes in release 2.20 (2014-06-03) [stable]
** 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.
* Noteworthy changes in release 2.19 (2014-05-22) [stable]
** Improvements
Performance has improved, typically by 10% and in some cases by a
factor of 200. However, performance of grep -P in UTF-8 locales has
gotten worse as part of the fix for the crashes mentioned below.
** Bug fixes
grep no longer mishandles patterns like [a-[.z.]], and no longer
mishandles patterns like [^a] in locales that have multicharacter
collating sequences so that [^a] can match a string of two characters.
grep no longer mishandles an empty pattern at the end of a pattern list.
[bug introduced in grep-2.5]
grep -C NUM now outputs separators consistently even when NUM is zero,
and similarly for grep -A NUM and grep -B NUM.
[bug present since "the beginning"]
grep -f no longer mishandles patterns containing NUL bytes.
[bug introduced in grep-2.11]
Plain grep, grep -E, and grep -F now treat encoding errors in patterns
the same way the GNU regular expression matcher treats them, with respect
to whether the errors can match parts of multibyte characters in data.
[bug present since "the beginning"]
grep -w no longer mishandles a potential match adjacent to a letter that
takes up two or more bytes in a multibyte encoding.
Similarly, the patterns '\<', '\>', '\b', and '\B' no longer
mishandle word-boundary matches in multibyte locales.
[bug present since "the beginning"]
grep -P now reports an error and exits when given invalid UTF-8 data.
Previously it was unreliable, and sometimes crashed or looped.
[bug introduced in grep-2.16]
grep -P now works with -w and -x and backreferences. Before,
echo aa|grep -Pw '(.)\1' would fail to match, yet
echo aa|grep -Pw '(.)\2' would match.
grep -Pw now works like grep -w in that the matched string has to be
preceded and followed by non-word components or the beginning and end
of the line (as opposed to word boundaries before). Before, this
echo a@@a| grep -Pw @@ would match, yet this
echo a@@a| grep -w @@ would not. Now, they both fail to match,
per the documentation on how grep's -w works.
grep -i no longer mishandles patterns containing titlecase characters.
For example, in a locale containing the titlecase character
'Lj' (U+01C8 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L WITH SMALL LETTER J),
'grep -i Lj' now matches both 'LJ' (U+01C7 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER LJ)
and 'lj' (U+01C9 LATIN SMALL LETTER LJ).
* Noteworthy changes in release 2.18 (2014-02-20) [stable]
** Bug fixes
grep no longer mishandles patterns like [^^-~] in unibyte locales.
[bug introduced in grep-2.8]
grep -i in a multibyte, non-UTF8 locale could be up to 200 times slower
than in 2.16. [bug introduced in grep-2.17]
* Noteworthy changes in release 2.17 (2014-02-17) [stable]
** Improvements
grep -i in a multibyte locale is now typically 10 times faster
for patterns that do not contain \ or [.
grep (without -i) in a multibyte locale is now up to 7 times faster
when processing many matched lines.
** Maintenance
grep's --mmap option was disabled in March of 2010, and began to
elicit a warning in January of 2012. Now it is completely gone.
* Noteworthy changes in release 2.16 (2014-01-01) [stable]
** Bug fixes
Fix gnulib-provided maint.mk so that the release procedure described
in README-release actually does what we want. Before that fix, that
procedure resulted in a grep-2.15 tarball that would lead to a grep
binary whose --version-reported version number was 2.14.51...
The fix to make \s and \S work with multi-byte white space broke
the use of each shortcut whenever followed by a repetition operator.
For example, \s*, \s+, \s? and \s{3} would all malfunction in a
multi-byte locale. [bug introduced in grep-2.15]
The fix to make grep -P work better with UTF-8 made it possible for
grep to evoke a larger set of PCRE errors, some of which could trigger
an abort. E.g., this would abort:
printf '\x82'|LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 grep -P y
Now grep handles arbitrary PCRE errors. [bug introduced in grep-2.15]
Handle very long lines (2GiB and longer) on systems with a deficient
read system call.
* Noteworthy changes in release 2.15 (2013-10-26) [stable]
** Bug fixes
grep's \s and \S failed to work with multi-byte white space characters.
For example, \s would fail to match a non-breaking space, and this
would print nothing: printf '\xc2\xa0' | LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 grep '\s'
A related bug is that \S would mistakenly match an invalid multibyte
character. For example, the following would match:
printf '\x82\n' | LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 grep '^\S$'
[bug present since grep-2.6]
grep -i would segfault on systems using UTF-16-based wchar_t (Cygwin)
when converting an input string containing certain 4-byte UTF-8
sequences to lower case. The conversions to wchar_t and back to
a UTF-8 multibyte string did not take surrogate pairs into account.
[bug present since at least grep-2.6, though the segfault is new with 2.13]
grep -E would segfault when given a regexp like '([^.]*[M]){1,2}'
for any multibyte character M. [bug introduced in grep-2.6, which would
segfault, but 2.7 and 2.8 had no problem, and 2.9 through 2.14 would
hit a failed assertion. ]
grep -F would get stuck in an infinite loop when given a search string
that is an invalid byte sequence in the current locale and that matches
the bytes of the input twice on a line. Now grep fails with exit status 1.
grep -P could misbehave. While multi-byte mode is only supported by PCRE
with UTF-8 locales, grep did not activate it. This would cause failures
to match multibyte characters against some regular expressions, especially
those including the '.' or '\p' metacharacters.
** New features
grep -P can now use a just-in-time compiler to greatly speed up matches,
This feature is transparent to the user; no flag is required to enable
it. It is only available if the corresponding support in the PCRE
library is detected when grep is compiled.
* Noteworthy changes in release 2.14 (2012-08-20) [stable]
** Bug fixes
grep -i '^$' could exit 0 (i.e., report a match) in a multi-byte locale,
even though there was no match, and the command generated no output.
E.g., seq 2 | LC_ALL=en_US.utf8 grep -il '^$' would mistakenly print
"(standard input)". Related, seq 9 | LC_ALL=en_US.utf8 grep -in '^$'
would print "2:4:6:8:10:12:14:16" and exit 0. Now it prints nothing
and exits with status of 1. [bug introduced in grep-2.6]
'grep' no longer falsely reports text files as being binary on file
systems that compress contents or that store tiny contents in metadata.
* Noteworthy changes in release 2.13 (2012-07-04) [stable]
** Bug fixes
grep -i, in a multi-byte locale, when matching a line containing a character
like the UTF-8 Turkish I-with-dot (U+0130) (whose lower-case representation
occupies fewer bytes), would print an incomplete output line.
Similarly, with a matched line containing a character (e.g., the Latin
capital I in a Turkish UTF-8 locale), where the lower-case representation
occupies more bytes, grep could print garbage.
[bug introduced in grep-2.6]
--include and --exclude can again be combined, and again apply to
the command line, e.g., "grep --include='*.[ch]' --exclude='system.h'
PATTERN *" again reads all *.c and *.h files except for system.h.
[bug introduced in grep-2.6]
** New features
'grep' without -z now treats a sparse file as binary, if it can
easily determine that the file is sparse.
** Dropped features
Bootstrapping with Makefile.boot has been broken since grep 2.6,
and was removed.
* Noteworthy changes in release 2.12 (2012-04-23) [stable]
** Bug fixes
"echo P|grep --devices=skip P" once again prints P, as it did in 2.10
[bug introduced in grep-2.11]
grep no longer segfaults with -r --exclude-dir and no file operand.
I.e., ":|grep -r --exclude-dir=D PAT" would segfault.
[bug introduced in grep-2.11]
Recursive grep now uses fts for directory traversal, so it can
handle much-larger directories without reporting things like "File
name too long", and it can run much faster when dealing with large
directory hierarchies. [bug present since the beginning]
grep -E 'a{1000000000}' now reports an overflow error rather than
silently acting like grep -E 'a\{1000000000}'.
grep -E 'a{,10}' was not treated equivalently to grep -E 'a{0,10}'.
** New features
The -R option now has a long-option alias --dereference-recursive.
** Changes in behavior
The -r (--recursive) option now follows only command-line symlinks.
Also, by default -r now reads a device only if it is named on the command
line; this can be overridden with --devices. -R acts as before, so
use -R if you prefer the old behavior of following all symlinks and
defaulting to reading all devices.
* Noteworthy changes in release 2.11 (2012-03-02) [stable]
** Bug fixes
grep no longer dumps core on lines whose lengths do not fit in 'int'.
(e.g., lines longer than 2 GiB on a typical 64-bit host).
Instead, grep either works as expected, or reports an error.
An error can occur if not enough main memory is available, or if the
GNU C library's regular expression functions cannot handle such long lines.
[bug present since "the beginning"]
The -m, -A, -B, and -C options no longer mishandle context line
counts that do not fit in 'int'. Also, grep -c's counts are now
limited by the type 'intmax_t' (typically less than 2**63) rather
than 'int' (typically less than 2**31).
grep no longer silently suppresses errors when reading a directory
as if it were a text file. For example, "grep x ." now reports a
read error on most systems; formerly, it ignored the error.
[bug introduced in grep-2.5]
grep now exits with status 2 if a directory loop is found,
instead of possibly exiting with status 0 or 1.
[bug introduced in grep-2.3]
The -s option now suppresses certain input error diagnostics that it
formerly failed to suppress. These include errors when closing the
input, when lseeking the input, and when the input is also the output.
[bug introduced in grep-2.4]
On POSIX systems, commands like "grep PAT < FILE >> FILE"
now report an error instead of looping.
[bug present since "the beginning"]
The --include, --exclude, and --exclude-dir options now handle
command-line arguments more consistently. --include and --exclude
apply only to non-directories and --exclude-dir applies only to
directories. "-" (standard input) is never excluded, since it is
not a file name.
[bug introduced in grep-2.5]
grep no longer rejects "grep -qr . > out", i.e., when run with -q
and an input file is the same as the output file, since with -q
grep generates no output, so there is no risk of infinite loop or
of an output-affecting race condition. Thus, the use of the following
options also disables the input-equals-output failure:
--max-count=N (-m) (for N >= 2)
--files-with-matches (-l)
--files-without-match (-L)
[bug introduced in grep-2.10]
grep no longer emits an error message and quits on MS-Windows when
invoked with the -r option.
grep no longer misinterprets some alternations involving anchors
(^, $, \< \> \B, \b). For example, grep -E "(^|\B)a" no
longer reports a match for the string "x a".
[bug present since "the beginning"]
** New features
If no file operand is given, and a command-line -r or equivalent
option is given, grep now searches the working directory. Formerly
grep ignored the -r and searched standard input nonrecursively.
An -r found in GREP_OPTIONS does not have this new effect.
grep now supports color highlighting of matches on MS-Windows.
** Changes in behavior
Use of the --mmap option now elicits a warning. It has been a no-op
since March of 2010.
grep no longer diagnoses write errors repeatedly; it exits after
diagnosing the first write error. This is better behavior when
writing to a dangling pipe.
Syntax errors in GREP_COLORS are now ignored, instead of sometimes
eliciting warnings. This is more consistent with programs that
(e.g.) ignore errors in termcap entries.
* Noteworthy changes in release 2.10 (2011-11-16) [stable]
** Bug fixes
grep no longer mishandles high-bit-set pattern bytes on systems
where "char" is a signed type. [bug appears to affect only MS-Windows]
On POSIX systems, grep now rejects a command like "grep -r pattern . > out",
in which the output file is also one of the inputs,
because it can result in an "infinite" disk-filling loop.
[bug present since "the beginning"]
** Build-related
"make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
only .tar.xz files is enough.
* Noteworthy changes in release 2.9 (2011-06-21) [stable]
** Bug fixes
grep no longer clobbers heap for an ERE like '(^| )*( |$)'
[bug introduced in grep-2.6]
grep is faster on regular expressions that match multibyte characters
in brackets (such as '[áéíóú]').
echo c|grep '[c]' would fail for any c in 0x80..0xff, with a uni-byte
encoding for which the byte-to-wide-char mapping is nontrivial. For
example, the ISO-88591 locales are not affected, but ru_RU.KOI8-R is.
[bug introduced in grep-2.6]
grep -P no longer aborts when PCRE's backtracking limit is exceeded
Before, echo aaaaaaaaaaaaaab |grep -P '((a+)*)+$' would abort. Now,
it diagnoses the problem and exits with status 2.
* Noteworthy changes in release 2.8 (2011-05-13) [stable]
** Bug fixes
echo c|grep '[c]' would fail for any c in 0x80..0xff, and in many locales.
E.g., printf '\xff\n'|grep "$(printf '[\xff]')" || echo FAIL
would print FAIL rather than the required matching line.
[bug introduced in grep-2.6]
grep's interpretation of range expression is now more consistent with
that of other tools. [bug present since multi-byte character set
support was introduced in 2.5.2, though the steps needed to reproduce
it changed in grep-2.6]
grep erroneously returned with exit status 1 on some memory allocation
failure. [bug present since "the beginning"]
* Noteworthy changes in release 2.7 (2010-09-16) [stable]
** Bug fixes
grep --include=FILE works once again, rather than working like --exclude=FILE
[bug introduced in grep-2.6]
Searching with grep -Fw for an empty string would not match an
empty line. [bug present since "the beginning"]
X{0,0} is implemented correctly. It used to be a synonym of X{0,1}.
[bug present since "the beginning"]
In multibyte locales, regular expressions including backreferences
no longer exhibit quadratic complexity (i.e., they are orders
of magnitude faster). [bug present since multi-byte character set
support was introduced in 2.5.2]
In UTF-8 locales, regular expressions including "." can be orders
of magnitude faster. For example, "grep ." is now twice as fast
as "grep -v ^$", instead of being immensely slower. It remains
slow in other multibyte locales. [bug present since multi-byte
character set support was introduced in 2.5.2]
--mmap was meant to be ignored in 2.6.x, but it was instead
removed by mistake. [bug introduced in 2.6]
** New features
On systems using glibc, grep can support equivalence classes. However,
whether they actually work depends on glibc's locale definitions.
* Noteworthy changes in release 2.6.3 (2010-04-02) [stable]
** Bug fixes
Searching with grep -F for an empty string in a multibyte locale
would hang grep. [bug introduced in 2.6.2]
PCRE support is once again detected on systems with