Suppose we are doing a multiline regex pattern search on a bunch of files and we want to extract the matches, e.g. for further processing. By default, grep outputs matches separated by newlines, but since we are doing multiline patterns this creates the inconvenience that we cannot easily extract the individual matches. So we would want to have the matches separated by null bytes. This seems to be a very straightforward feature, and I was surprised that this was not already possible.
Here is a tiny example grep -rzPIho '}\n\n\w\w\b' | od -a Depending on the files in your file tree, this may yield an output like 0000000 } nl nl m y nl } nl nl i f nl } nl nl m0000020 y nl } nl nl m y nl } nl nl i f nl } nl0000040 nl m y nl0000044 As you can see, we cannot split on newlines to obtain the matches for further processing, since the matches contain newline characters themselves. Now grep already has the -z/--null flag, but that works only in conjunction with the -l flag, which makes grep output filenames instead of matches. So here the feature request: can we make the -z flag also affect the normal output? Regards, Chiel
