* Noteworthy changes in release 3.3 (2018-12-20) [stable]
** Bug fixes
Some uses of \b in the C locale and with the DFA matcher would fail, e.g.,
the following would print nothing (it should print the input line):
echo 123-x|LC_ALL=C grep '.\bx'
Using a multibyte locale, using certain regexp constructs (some ranges,
backreferences), or forcing use of the PCRE matcher via --perl-regexp (-P)
would avoid the bug.
[bug introduced in grep 2.3]
* Noteworthy changes in release 3.2 (2018-12-20) [stable]
** Changes in behavior
The --files-without-match (-L) option now causes grep to succeed
when a file is listed, instead of when a line is selected. This
resembles what git-grep does.
** Bug fixes
The --recursive (-r) option no longer fails on MS-Windows.
[bug introduced in grep 2.11]
** Improvements
An over-30x performance improvement when many 'or'd expressions
share a common prefix, thanks to improvements in gnulib's dfa.c,
by Norihiro Tanaka. See gnulib commits v0.1-2110-ge648401be,
v0.1-2111-g4299106ce, v0.1-2117-g617a60974
An additional 3-23% speed-up when searching large files, via
increased initial buffer size.
grep now diagnoses stack overflow. Before grep-2.6, the included
regexp code would detect it. Since 2.6, grep defaulted to using
glibc's regexp, which lost that capability.
** Improvements
grep '[0-9]' is now just as fast as grep '[[:digit:]]' when run
in a multi-byte locale. Before, it was several times slower.
** Changes in behavior
Context no longer excludes selected lines omitted because of -m.
For example, 'grep "^" -m1 -A1' now outputs the first two input
lines, not just the first line. This fixes a glitch that has been
present since -m was added in grep 2.5.
The following changes affect only MS-Windows platforms. First, the
--binary (-U) option now governs whether binary I/O is used, instead
of a heuristic that was sometimes incorrect. Second, the
--unix-byte-offsets (-u) option now has no effect on MS-Windows too.
Changelog:
* Noteworthy changes in release 3.0 (2017-02-09) [stable]
** Bug fixes
grep without -F no longer goes awry when given two or more patterns
that contain no special characters other than '\' and also contain a
subpattern like '\.' that escapes a character to make it ordinary.
[bug introduced in grep 2.28]
grep no longer fails to build on PCRE versions before 8.20.
[bug introduced in grep 2.28]
* Noteworthy changes in release 2.28 (2017-02-06) [stable]
** Bug fixes
When grep -Fo finds matches of differing length, it could
mistakenly print a shorter one. Now it prints a longest one.
[bug introduced in grep-2.26]
When standard output is /dev/null, grep no longer fails when
standard input is a file in the Linux /proc file system, or when
standard input is a pipe and standard output is in append mode.
[bugs introduced in grep-2.27]
Fix performance regression with multiple patterns, e.g., for -Fi in
a multi-byte locale, or for -Fw in a single-byte locale.
[bugs introduced in grep-2.19, grep-2.22 and grep-2.26]
** Improvements
Improve performance for -E or -G pattern lists that are easily
converted to -F format.
Upstream changes:
* Noteworthy changes in release 2.27 (2016-12-06) [stable]
** Bug fixes
grep no longer reports a false match in a multibyte, non-UTF8 locale
like zh_CN.gb18030, with a regular expression like ".*7" that just
happens to match the 4-byte representation of gb18030's \uC9, the
final byte of which is the digit "7".
[bug introduced in grep-2.19]
grep by default now reads all of standard input if it is a pipe,
even if this cannot affect grep's output or exit status. This works
better with nonportable scripts that run "PROGRAM | grep PATTERN
>/dev/null" where PROGRAM dies when writing into a broken pipe.
[bug introduced in grep-2.26]
grep no longer mishandles ranges in nontrivial unibyte locales.
[bug introduced in grep-2.26]
grep -P no longer attempts multiline matches. This works more
intuitively with unusual patterns, and means that grep -Pz no longer
rejects patterns containing ^ and $ and works when combined with -x.
[bugs introduced in grep-2.23] A downside is that grep -P is now
significantly slower, albeit typically still faster than pcregrep.
grep -m0 -L PAT FILE now outputs "FILE". [bug introduced in grep-2.5]
To output ':' and tab-align the following character C, grep -T no
longer outputs tab-backspace-':'-C, an approach that has problems if
run inside an Emacs shell window. [bug introduced in grep-2.5.2]
grep -T now uses worst-case widths of line numbers and byte offsets
instead of guessing widths that might not work with larger files.
[bug introduced in grep-2.5.2]
grep's use of getprogname no longer causes a build failure on HP-UX.
** Improvements
grep no longer reads the input in a few more cases when it is easy
to see that matching cannot succeed, e.g., 'grep -f /dev/null'.
* Noteworthy changes in release 2.26 (2016-10-02) [stable]
** Bug fixes
Grep no longer omits output merely because it follows an output line
suppressed due to encoding errors. [bug introduced in grep-2.21]
In the Shift_JIS locale, grep no longer mistakenly matches in the
middle of a multibyte character. [bug present since "the beginning"]
** Improvements
grep can be much faster now when standard output is /dev/null.
grep -F is now typically much faster when many patterns are given,
as it now uses the Aho-Corasick algorithm instead of the
Commentz-Walter algorithm in that case.
grep -iF is typically much faster in a multibyte locale, if the
pattern and its case counterparts contain only single byte characters.
grep with complicated expressions (e.g., back-references) and without
-i now uses the regex fastmap for better performance.
In multibyte locales, grep now handles leading "." in patterns more
efficiently.
grep now prints a "FILENAME:LINENO: " prefix when diagnosing an
invalid regular expression that was read from an '-f'-specified file.
* Noteworthy changes in release 2.25 (2016-04-21) [stable]
** Bug fixes
In the C or POSIX locale, grep now treats all bytes as valid
characters even if the C runtime library says otherwise. The
revised behavior is more compatible with the original intent of
POSIX, and the next release of POSIX will likely make this official.
[bug introduced in grep-2.23]
grep -Pz no longer mistakenly diagnoses patterns like [^a] that use
negated character classes. [bug introduced in grep-2.24]
grep -oz now uses null bytes, not newlines, to terminate output lines.
[bug introduced in grep-2.5]
** Improvements
grep now outputs details more consistently when reporting a write error.
E.g., "grep: write error: No space left on device" rather than just
"grep: write error".
Changelog:
* Noteworthy changes in release 2.24 (2016-03-10) [stable]
** Bug fixes
grep -z would match strings it should not. To trigger the bug, you'd
have to use a regular expression including an anchor (^ or $) and a
feature like a range or a backreference, causing grep to forego its DFA
matcher and resort to using re_search. With a multibyte locale, that
matcher could mistakenly match a string containing a newline.
For example, this command:
printf 'a\nb\0' | LC_ALL=en_US.utf-8 grep -z '^[a-b]*b'
would mistakenly match and print all four input bytes. After the fix,
there is no match, as expected.
[bug introduced in grep-2.7]
grep -Pz now diagnoses attempts to use patterns containing ^ and $,
instead of mishandling these patterns. This problem seems to be
inherent to the PCRE API; removing this limitation is on PCRE's
maint/README wish list. Patterns can continue to match literal ^
and $ by escaping them with \ (now needed even inside [...]).
[bug introduced in grep-2.5]
Changelog:
* Noteworthy changes in release 2.23 (2016-02-04) [stable]
** Bug fixes
Binary files are now less likely to generate diagnostics and more
likely to yield text matches. grep now reports "Binary file FOO
matches" and suppresses further output instead of outputting a line
containing an encoding error; hence grep can now report matching text
before a later binary match. Formerly, grep reported FOO to be
binary when it found an encoding error in FOO before generating
output for FOO, which meant it never reported both matching text and
matching binary data; this was less useful for searching text
containing encoding errors in non-matching lines.
[bug introduced in grep-2.21]
grep -c no longer stops counting when finding binary data.
[bug introduced in grep-2.21]
grep no longer outputs encoding errors in unibyte locales.
For example, if the byte '\x81' is not a valid character in a
unibyte locale, grep treats the byte as binary data.
[bug introduced in grep-2.21]
grep -oP is no longer susceptible to an infinite loop when processing
invalid UTF8 just before a match.
[bug introduced in grep-2.22]
--exclude and related options are now matched against trailing
parts of command-line arguments, not against the entire arguments.
This partly reverts the --exclude-related change in 2.22.
[bug introduced in grep-2.22]
--line-buffer is no longer ineffective when combined with -l.
[bug introduced in grep-2.5]
-xw is now equivalent to -x more consistently, with -P and with backrefs.
[bug only partially fixed in grep-2.19]
Changelog:
* Noteworthy changes in release 2.22 (2015-11-01) [stable]
** Improvements
Performance has improved for patterns containing very long strings,
reducing preprocessing time for an N-byte regexp from O(N^2) to
only slightly superlinear for most patterns. Before, a command like
the following would take over a minute, but now, it takes less than
a second:
: | grep -f <(seq -s '' 99999)
When building grep, 'configure' now uses PCRE's pkg-config module for
configuration information, rather than attempting to guess it by hand.
** Bug fixes
A DFA matcher bug made this command mistakenly print its input line:
echo axb | grep -E '^x|x$'
Likewise for this equivalent command:
echo axb | grep -e '^x' -e 'x$'
[bug introduced in grep-2.19 ]
grep no longer reads from uninitialized memory or from beyond the end
of the heap-allocated input buffer. This fix addressed CVE-2015-1345.
[bug introduced in grep-2.19 ]
With -z, '.' and '[^x]' in a pattern now consistently match newline.
Previously, they sometimes matched newline, and sometimes did not.
[bug introduced in grep-2.4]
When the JIT stack is exhausted, grep -P now grows the stack rather
than reporting an internal PCRE error.
'grep -D skip PATTERN FILE' no longer hangs if FILE is a fifo.
[bug introduced in grep-2.12]
--exclude and related options are now matched against entire
command-line arguments, not against command-line components.
[bug introduced in grep-2.6]
Fix performance degradation of grep -Fw in unibyte locales.
[bug introduced in grep-2.19 ]
Problems found locating distfiles:
Package cabocha: missing distfile cabocha-0.68.tar.bz2
Package convertlit: missing distfile clit18src.zip
Package php-enchant: missing distfile php-enchant/enchant-1.1.0.tgz
Otherwise, existing SHA1 digests verified and found to be the same on
the machine holding the existing distfiles (morden). All existing
SHA1 digests retained for now as an audit trail.
Changelog:
* Noteworthy changes in release 2.21 (2014-11-23) [stable]
** Improvements
Performance has been greatly improved for searching files containing
holes, on platforms where lseek's SEEK_DATA flag works efficiently.
Performance has improved for rejecting data that cannot match even
the first part of a nontrivial pattern.
Performance has improved for very long strings in patterns.
If a file contains data improperly encoded for the current locale,
and this is discovered before any of the file's contents are output,
grep now treats the file as binary.
grep -P no longer reports an error and exits when given invalid UTF-8 data.
Instead, it considers the data to be non-matching.
** Bug fixes
grep no longer mishandles patterns that contain \w or \W in multibyte
locales.
grep would fail to count newlines internally when operating in non-UTF8
multibyte locales, leading it to print potentially many lines that did
not match. E.g., the command, "seq 10 | env LC_ALL=zh_CN src/grep -n .."
would print this:
1:1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
implying that the match, "10" was on line 1.
[bug introduced in grep-2.19]
grep -F -x -o no longer prints an extra newline for each match.
[bug introduced in grep-2.19]
grep in a non-UTF8 multibyte locale could mistakenly match in the middle
of a multibyte character when using a '^'-anchored alternate in a pattern,
leading it to print non-matching lines. [bug present since "the beginning"]
grep -F Y no longer fails to match in non-UTF8 multibyte locales like
Shift-JIS, when the input contains a 2-byte character, XY, followed by
the single-byte search pattern, Y. grep would find the first, middle-
of-multibyte matching "Y", and then mistakenly advance an internal
pointer one byte too far, skipping over the target "Y" just after that.
[bug introduced in grep-2.19]
grep -E rejected unmatched ')', instead of treating it like '\)'.
[bug present since "the beginning"]
On NetBSD, grep -r no longer reports "Inappropriate file type or format"
when refusing to follow a symbolic link.
[bug introduced in grep-2.12]
** Changes in behavior
The GREP_OPTIONS environment variable is now obsolescent, and grep
now warns if it is used. Please use an alias or script instead.
In locales with multibyte character encodings other than UTF-8,
grep -P now reports an error and exits instead of misbehaving.
When searching binary data, grep now may treat non-text bytes as
line terminators. This can boost performance significantly.
grep -z no longer automatically treats the byte '\200' as binary data.
* Noteworthy changes in release 2.20 (2014-06-03) [stable]
** Bug fixes
grep --max-count=N FILE would no longer stop reading after the Nth match.
I.e., while grep would still print the correct output, it would continue
reading until end of input, and hence, potentially forever.
[bug introduced in grep-2.19]
A command like echo aa|grep -E 'a(b$|c$)' would mistakenly
report the input as a matched line.
[bug introduced in grep-2.19]
** Changes in behavior
grep --exclude-dir='FOO/' now excludes the directory FOO.
Previously, the trailing slash meant the option was ineffective.
** Improvements
Performance has improved, typically by 10% and in some cases by a
factor of 200. However, performance of grep -P in UTF-8 locales has
gotten worse as part of the fix for the crashes mentioned below.
** Bug fixes
grep no longer mishandles patterns like [a-[.z.]], and no longer
mishandles patterns like [^a] in locales that have multicharacter
collating sequences so that [^a] can match a string of two characters.
grep no longer mishandles an empty pattern at the end of a pattern list.
[bug introduced in grep-2.5]
grep -C NUM now outputs separators consistently even when NUM is zero,
and similarly for grep -A NUM and grep -B NUM.
[bug present since "the beginning"]
grep -f no longer mishandles patterns containing NUL bytes.
[bug introduced in grep-2.11]
Plain grep, grep -E, and grep -F now treat encoding errors in patterns
the same way the GNU regular expression matcher treats them, with respect
to whether the errors can match parts of multibyte characters in data.
[bug present since "the beginning"]
grep -w no longer mishandles a potential match adjacent to a letter that
takes up two or more bytes in a multibyte encoding.
Similarly, the patterns '\<', '\>', '\b', and '\B' no longer
mishandle word-boundary matches in multibyte locales.
[bug present since "the beginning"]
grep -P now reports an error and exits when given invalid UTF-8 data.
Previously it was unreliable, and sometimes crashed or looped.
[bug introduced in grep-2.16]
grep -P now works with -w and -x and backreferences. Before,
echo aa|grep -Pw '(.)\1' would fail to match, yet
echo aa|grep -Pw '(.)\2' would match.
grep -Pw now works like grep -w in that the matched string has to be
preceded and followed by non-word components or the beginning and end
of the line (as opposed to word boundaries before). Before, this
echo a@@a| grep -Pw @@ would match, yet this
echo a@@a| grep -w @@ would not. Now, they both fail to match,
per the documentation on how grep's -w works.
grep -i no longer mishandles patterns containing titlecase characters.
For example, in a locale containing the titlecase character
'Lj' (U+01C8 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L WITH SMALL LETTER J),
'grep -i Lj' now matches both 'LJ' (U+01C7 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER LJ)
and 'lj' (U+01C9 LATIN SMALL LETTER LJ).
Bug fixes:
* grep no longer mishandles patterns like [^^-~] in unibyte locales.
* grep -i in a multibyte, non-UTF8 locale could be up to 200 times slower
than in 2.16.
** Bug fixes
Fix gnulib-provided maint.mk so that the release procedure described
in README-release actually does what we want. Before that fix, that
procedure resulted in a grep-2.15 tarball that would lead to a grep
binary whose --version-reported version number was 2.14.51...
The fix to make \s and \S work with multi-byte white space broke
the use of each shortcut whenever followed by a repetition operator.
For example, \s*, \s+, \s? and \s{3} would all malfunction in a
multi-byte locale. [bug introduced in grep-2.15]
The fix to make grep -P work better with UTF-8 made it possible for
grep to evoke a larger set of PCRE errors, some of which could trigger
an abort. E.g., this would abort:
printf '\x82'|LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 grep -P y
Now grep handles arbitrary PCRE errors. [bug introduced in grep-2.15]
Handle very long lines (2GiB and longer) on systems with a deficient
read system call.
* Noteworthy changes in release 2.15 (2013-10-26) [stable]
** Bug fixes
grep's \s and \S failed to work with multi-byte white space characters.
For example, \s would fail to match a non-breaking space, and this
would print nothing: printf '\xc2\xa0' | LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 grep '\s'
A related bug is that \S would mistakenly match an invalid multibyte
character. For example, the following would match:
printf '\x82\n' | LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 grep '^\S$'
[bug present since grep-2.6]
grep -i would segfault on systems using UTF-16-based wchar_t (Cygwin)
when converting an input string containing certain 4-byte UTF-8
sequences to lower case. The conversions to wchar_t and back to
a UTF-8 multibyte string did not take surrogate pairs into account.
[bug present since at least grep-2.6, though the segfault is new with 2.13]
grep -E would segfault when given a regexp like '([^.]*[M]){1,2}'
for any multibyte character M. [bug introduced in grep-2.6, which would
segfault, but 2.7 and 2.8 had no problem, and 2.9 through 2.14 would
hit a failed assertion. ]
grep -F would get stuck in an infinite loop when given a search string
that is an invalid byte sequence in the current locale and that matches
the bytes of the input twice on a line. Now grep fails with exit status 1.
grep -P could misbehave. While multi-byte mode is only supported by PCRE
with UTF-8 locales, grep did not activate it. This would cause failures
to match multibyte characters against some regular expressions, especially
those including the '.' or '\p' metacharacters.
** New features
grep -P can now use a just-in-time compiler to greatly speed up matches,
This feature is transparent to the user; no flag is required to enable
it. It is only available if the corresponding support in the PCRE
library is detected when grep is compiled.
** Bug fixes
grep -i '^$' could exit 0 (i.e., report a match) in a multi-byte locale,
even though there was no match, and the command generated no output.
E.g., seq 2 | LC_ALL=en_US.utf8 grep -il '^$' would mistakenly print
"(standard input)". Related, seq 9 | LC_ALL=en_US.utf8 grep -in '^$'
would print "2:4:6:8:10:12:14:16" and exit 0. Now it prints nothing
and exits with status of 1. [bug introduced in grep-2.6]
'grep' no longer falsely reports text files as being binary on file
systems that compress contents or that store tiny contents in metadata.
** Bug fixes
grep -i, in a multi-byte locale, when matching a line containing a character
like the UTF-8 Turkish I-with-dot (U+0130) (whose lower-case representation
occupies fewer bytes), would print an incomplete output line.
Similarly, with a matched line containing a character (e.g., the Latin
capital I in a Turkish UTF-8 locale), where the lower-case representation
occupies more bytes, grep could print garbage.
[bug introduced in grep-2.6]
--include and --exclude can again be combined, and again apply to
the command line, e.g., "grep --include='*.[ch]' --exclude='system.h'
PATTERN *" again reads all *.c and *.h files except for system.h.
[bug introduced in grep-2.6]
** New features
'grep' without -z now treats a sparse file as binary, if it can
easily determine that the file is sparse.
** Dropped features
Bootstrapping with Makefile.boot has been broken since grep 2.6,
and was removed.
Main changes are move to GPLv3 and several updated translations.
Also some bugfixes (at least the ones we had patched in pkgsrc).
Sorry, not more specific because NEWS isn't properly maintained.
