bug#32704: Can grep search for a line feed and a null character at the same time?

[Eric Blake]

On 9/11/18 12:14 PM, Paul Eggert wrote:
> On 9/11/18 10:03 AM, Eric Blake wrote:
> > maybe we really do have a bug - when -z is in effect, I'd expect NUL, 
> > rather than newline, to be the byte that separates separate patterns 
> > in the pattern argument
>
> You're right, I think it's a bug that grep -zf FILE uses newline 
> separators in FILE. It should use NUL separators.
>
> This cannot be done for NUL bytes in command-line patterns, though, 
> since command-line arguments cannot contain NUL bytes.

Indeed.  But that merely means that on the command line, when -z is in 
effect, you can't specify multiple patterns (but instead have to use -f 
FILE if that's what you really want).  Meanwhile, the effect on being 
able to match a literal newline would be observable from either the 
command line or -f FILE.

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Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
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