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When using grep in linux, the result often contains a lot of "binary file XXX matches", which I do not care about. How to suppress this part of the results, or how to exclude binary files in grep?
969
To force GNU grep to output lines even from files that appear to be binary, use the -a or ' --binary-files=text ' option. To eliminate the “Binary file matches” messages, use the -I or ' --binary-files=without-match ' option, or the -s or --no-messages option.
By default, TYPE is binary, and grep normally outputs either a one-line message saying that a binary file matches, or no message if there is no match. If TYPE is without-match, grep assumes that a binary file does not match; this is equivalent to the -I option.
As this answer notes, there are two cases where grep thinks your file is binary: if there's an encoding error detected, or if it detects some NUL bytes. Both of these sound at least conceptually simple, but it turns out that grep tries to be clever about detecting NULs.
You can also use the “grep –a” command combined with the “cat” command as shown below. Let's use the alternative “—binary-files=text” of the “-a” option for the grep command on the 'new.sh' binary file. It shows the same output as we got for the “-a” option.
There are three options, that you can use. -I is to exclude binary files in grep. Other are for line numbers and file names.
grep -I -n -H
-I -- process a binary file as if it did not contain matching data;
-n -- prefix each line of output with the 1-based line number within its input file
-H -- print the file name for each match
So this might be a way to run grep:
grep -InH your-word *
answered Sep 25 '22 17:09
This is an old question and its been answered but I thought I'd put the --binary-files=text option here for anyone who wants to use it. The -I option ignores the binary file but if you want the grep to treat the binary file as a text file use --binary-files=text like so:
bash$ grep -i reset mediaLog*
Binary file mediaLog_dc1.txt matches
bash$ grep --binary-files=text -i reset mediaLog*
mediaLog_dc1.txt:2016-06-29 15:46:02,470 - Media [uploadChunk ,315] - ERROR - ('Connection aborted.', error(104, 'Connection reset by peer'))
mediaLog_dc1.txt:ConnectionError: ('Connection aborted.', error(104, 'Connection reset by peer'))
bash$
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