bug#24347: Bug when grepping a text file with some arbitrary binary data

[Paul Eggert]

On 09/12/2016 03:16 PM, Karl Berry wrote:
     Either of the following shell commands should work with grep 2.25:
     LC_ALL=C grep 31325 test
     grep -a 31325 test
In my grep 2.25 (compiled from original source), these two commands are
not equivalent.

They are not equivalent in general, though they should have the same 
behavior with this bug report's original test case. Sorry, I should have 
been clearer about that.

The difference is that grep -a treats the NUL byte as text, whereas 
LC_ALL=C grep treats it as binary. The latter has been longstanding 
behavior for quite some time.