bug#23763: Bug report: Grep stops, if a text file contains a null character after 32768 bytes

[sur-behoffski]

On 06/15/16 15:00, Paul Eggert wrote:
> Bjoern Voigt wrote:
> > --binary-files=TYPE
> >    If the first few bytes of a file indicate that the file
> >    contains binary data, assume that the file is of type TYPE.
>
> That's another place where the man page is obsolete and wrong. (In GNU 
> projects, man pages are often poorly maintained as they are not the primary 
> form of documentation; one is supposed to read the manual instead.) I installed 
> the attached patch to fix that.
>
> > My MySQL mysqldump problem can be solved with --text or
> > --binary-files=text. So I do not search a quick solution anymore.
>
> Works for me.

G'day,

Fairly pedantic comment:  I try to keep reserve the term "null" to use in
a pointer context (as NULL), and to use ASCII NUL for the zero character
('\0').  [Just checked, EBCDIC also uses NUL as its name for character
value 0.]

My experience (admittedly somewhat dated, and/or for smaller architectures)
is that preserving the distinction is valuable.

Are there documentation standards, especially GNU ones, that cover this
distinction?  If not, is it worth striving to gradually introduce this
in a systematic manner, e.g. "NUL (the zero character)"?

cheers,

sur-behoffski (Brenton Hoff)
Programmer, Grouse Software