bug#23052: Make grep be able to separate output by NULL characters?

[Paul Eggert]

On 03/18/2016 02:20 AM, Chiel ten Brinke wrote:
> Suppose we are doing a multiline regex pattern search on a bunch of files
> and we want to extract the matches, e.g. for further processing. By
> default, grep outputs matches separated by newlines, but since we are doing
> multiline patterns this creates the inconvenience that we cannot easily
> extract the individual matches.

Thanks for pointing this out. The problem is more than just an 
inconvenience: grep's behavior is incorrect, since (as you mention) its 
output can be ambiguous. -o and -z were added separately to GNU grep, 
and it appears that their combination wasn't considered.  I installed 
the attached patch to the grep master so that -z uses null bytes to 
terminate output lines even when -o is used.

0001-grep-oz-now-outputs-null-bytes-not-newlines.patch
Description: Source code patch