NEWS revision 55360
1Version 2.4: 2 3 - egrep is now equivalent to `grep -E' as required by POSIX, 4 removing a longstanding source of confusion and incompatibility. 5 `grep' is now more forgiving about stray `{'s, for backward 6 compatibility with traditional egrep. 7 8 - The lower bound of an interval is not optional. 9 You must use an explicit zero, e.g. `x{0,10}' instead of `x{,10}'. 10 (The old documentation incorrectly claimed that it was optional.) 11 12 - The --revert-match option has been renamed to --invert-match. 13 14 - The --fixed-regexp option has been renamed to --fixed-string. 15 16 - New option -H or --with-filename. 17 18 - New option --mmap. By default, GNU grep now uses read instead of mmap. 19 This is faster on some hosts, and is safer on all. 20 21 - The new option -z or --null-data causes `grep' to treat a zero byte 22 (the ASCII NUL character) as a line terminator in input data, and 23 to treat newlines as ordinary data. 24 25 - The new option -Z or --null causes `grep' to output a zero byte 26 instead of the normal separator after a file name. 27 28 - These two options can be used with commands like `find -print0', 29 `perl -0', `sort -z', and `xargs -0' to process arbitrary file names, 30 even those that contain newlines. 31 32 - The environment variable GREP_OPTIONS specifies default options; 33 e.g. GREP_OPTIONS='--directories=skip' reestablishes grep 2.1's 34 behavior of silently skipping directories. 35 36 - You can specify a matcher multiple times without error, e.g. 37 `grep -E -E' or `fgrep -F'. It is still an error to specify 38 conflicting matchers. 39 40 - -u and -U are now allowed on non-DOS hosts, and have no effect. 41 42 - Modifications of the tests scripts to go around the "Broken Pipe" 43 errors from bash. See Bash FAQ. 44 45 - New option -r or --recursive or --directories=recurse. 46 (This option was also in grep 2.3, but wasn't announced here.) 47 48 - --without-included-regex disable, was causing bogus reports .i.e 49 doing more harm then good. 50 51Version 2.3: 52 53 - When searching a binary file FOO, grep now just reports 54 `Binary file FOO matches' instead of outputting binary data. 55 This is typically more useful than the old behavior, 56 and it is also more consistent with other utilities like `diff'. 57 A file is considered to be binary if it contains a NUL (i.e. zero) byte. 58 59 The new -a or --text option causes `grep' to assume that all 60 input is text. (This option has the same meaning as with `diff'.) 61 Use it if you want binary data in your output. 62 63 - `grep' now searches directories just like ordinary files; it no longer 64 silently skips directories. This is the traditional behavior of 65 Unix text utilities (in particular, of traditional `grep'). 66 Hence `grep PATTERN DIRECTORY' should report 67 `grep: DIRECTORY: Is a directory' on hosts where the operating system 68 does not permit programs to read directories directly, and 69 `grep: DIRECTORY: Binary file matches' (or nothing) otherwise. 70 71 The new -d ACTION or --directories=ACTION option affects directory handling. 72 `-d skip' causes `grep' to silently skip directories, as in grep 2.1; 73 `-d read' (the default) causes `grep' to read directories if possible, 74 as in earlier versions of grep. 75 76 - The MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows ports now behave identically to the 77 GNU and Unix ports with respect to binary files and directories. 78 79Version 2.2: 80 81Bug fix release. 82 83 - Status error number fix. 84 - Skipping directories removed. 85 - Many typos fix. 86 - -f /dev/null fix(not to consider as an empty pattern). 87 - Checks for wctype/wchar. 88 - -E was using the wrong matcher fix. 89 - bug in regex char class fix 90 - Fixes for DJGPP 91 92Version 2.1: 93 94This is a bug fix release(see Changelog) i.e. no new features. 95 96 - More compliance to GNU standard. 97 - Long options. 98 - Internationalisation. 99 - Use automake/autoconf. 100 - Directory hierarchy change. 101 - Sigvec with -e on Linux corrected. 102 - Sigvec with -f on Linux corrected. 103 - Sigvec with the mmap() corrected. 104 - Bug in kwset corrected. 105 - -q, -L and -l stop on first match. 106 - New and improve regex.[ch] from Ulrich Drepper. 107 - New and improve dfa.[ch] from Arnold Robbins. 108 - Prototypes for over zealous C compiler. 109 - Not scanning a file, if it's a directory 110 (cause problems on Sun). 111 - Ported to MS-DOS/MS-Windows with DJGPP tools. 112 113See Changelog for the full story and proper credits. 114 115Version 2.0: 116 117The most important user visible change is that egrep and fgrep have 118disappeared as separate programs into the single grep program mandated 119by POSIX 1003.2. New options -G, -E, and -F have been added, 120selecting grep, egrep, and fgrep behavior respectively. For 121compatibility with historical practice, hard links named egrep and 122fgrep are also provided. See the manual page for details. 123 124In addition, the regular expression facilities described in Posix 125draft 11.2 are now supported, except for internationalization features 126related to locale-dependent collating sequence information. 127 128There is a new option, -L, which is like -l except it lists 129files which don't contain matches. The reason this option was 130added is because '-l -v' doesn't do what you expect. 131 132Performance has been improved; the amount of improvement is platform 133dependent, but (for example) grep 2.0 typically runs at least 30% faster 134than grep 1.6 on a DECstation using the MIPS compiler. Where possible, 135grep now uses mmap() for file input; on a Sun 4 running SunOS 4.1 this 136may cut system time by as much as half, for a total reduction in running 137time by nearly 50%. On machines that don't use mmap(), the buffering 138code has been rewritten to choose more favorable alignments and buffer 139sizes for read(). 140 141Portability has been substantially cleaned up, and an automatic 142configure script is now provided. 143 144The internals have changed in ways too numerous to mention. 145People brave enough to reuse the DFA matcher in other programs 146will now have their bravery amply "rewarded", for the interface 147to that file has been completely changed. Some changes were 148necessary to track the evolution of the regex package, and since 149I was changing it anyway I decided to do a general cleanup. 150