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