Re: SEEK_HOLE defined but useless on linux-3.4+/ext4 [Re: small ascii files can be sparse

[Paul Eggert]

On 08/01/2012 07:04 AM, Martin Carroll wrote:
> why do it just for grep?

I don't think we want to do it just for grep.
The same idea would apply to other tools that
want to do something special for binary versus
text files.  "diff", for example.

> grep should have two modes,
> one in which it asciifies binary data in the output, and one in which
> asciification is disabled, and the choice of mode should be based
> solely on command-line arguments, not on the contents of the file

Those modes might be good to add, but the current
behavior is often useful for me.  If I type
'grep -rw 'open' *', I don't want to see
all the strings containing 'open' in random *.o files
that happen to be lying around, though it is helpful
for me to know that the files are there.