On Feb 7, 10:14am, Simon Burge wrote:
} Subject: Re: Suggestion: keep binary data out of /etc

} > Note also, that I grep object files regularly enough that having
} > to remember that I now need -a for what has "just worked" for the last 15
} > year would be utterly annoying to me.
} 
} Completely seriously - of what use can this be?  When I've accidently
} grep'd some sort of object file, more often than not my xterm needs to
} have a full reset from the ctrl-middle-btn menu because text is now
} invisible or something else.

It's even more fun if the binary junk being sent to the terminal contains
an escape sequence that causes your terminal to spit something back that
your shell attempts to execute once grep exits.  "rm -rf /" anyone?

It would be nice if there was some way to combine "strings" and "grep".
For a single file "strings file | grep whatever" does what I want, but
there's no simple way to do the equivalent of "grep list-of-files".