> >  int isBinaryFile()
> >  
> >    /* look for non-printable chars */
> >    for(i = 0; i < n; i++)
> >      if (!isprint(buf[i]) && !isspace(buf[i]))
> >        return(1);
> 
> This is broken as long as "isprint" doesn't have proper NLS support.
> Even then it's arguable that you might print text files from other locales 
> some times...


Yeah, I realized that, but you can argue the it is isprint() that is 
really broken.  Either way, most text files are based upon 7 bit 
characters - especially source code file.

The whole matter might be moot, however.  I have been trying to crash grep
(rgrep, without the -a argument) on large binary files, and I can't do it. 
The largest binary file that I have on my system is a 30M gzipped dump
file, and grep happily searches through that without problems.  In fact,
it searches through the whole directory tree containing 170M of similar
files. 

Maybe I am just lucky, or maybe grep isn't as broken as people think.



Jeff Thieleke