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

[Paul Eggert]

On 08/01/2012 07:28 AM, Martin Carroll wrote:
> Why do you prefer
> 
>     Binary file matches
> 
> over
> 
>     [binary data]an occurence of open[binary data]
>     [binary data]another occurence of open[binary data]

Typically the latter output is far too long and
takes up too much of my screen.  I can get that output
if I want it, by using 'grep -a', but I hardly ever want it.

I take your point that the Unix philosophy is for tools
to not care about text versus binary data, but in practice
that philosophy was never implemented for 'grep' -- the original
v7 grep messed up with binary data -- and in general for
tools that are text-oriented (grep, diff) having the
default behavior be to treat binary data as text
might not be the best thing.