On Feb 7, 12:13am, Olaf Seibert wrote:
} Subject: Re: Suggestion: keep binary data out of /etc
} In <199902062226.XAA16644@orade.ora.de> Christoph Badura <bad@ora.de> writes:
} >So tell me one thing.   Since Unix doesn't have the concept of binary files
} >(or rather -- since it treats all files as an opaque stream of binary octets
} >-- no concept of non-binary files) how can grep possibly tell that a given
} >file isn't a binary file?
} 
} Grap already does not treat files as an opaque stream of binary octets:
} it imposes/assumes lines terminated by newlines.

A lot of grep implementations will misbehave, core dump, or whatever
if the lines are too long since a lot of implementations will attempt
to read each line into a fixed length buffer.  Even if the buffer is
dynamically allocated, what's going to happen if you feed grep a huge
file that doesn't contain any newlines?