grep 3.8 released

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 03, 2022

This is to announce grep-3.8, a stable release.
Special thanks to Carlo Arenas for adding PCRE2 support
and to Paul Eggert for his many fine changes.


There have been 104 commits by 6 people in the 55 weeks since 3.7.
See the NEWS below for a brief summary.


Thanks to everyone who has contributed!
The following people contributed changes to this release:


  Carlo Marcelo Arenas Belón (2)
  Helge Kreutzmann (1)
  Jim Meyering (27)
  Ondřej Fiala (1)
  Paul Eggert (71)
  Ulrich Eckhardt (2)


Jim [on behalf of the grep maintainers]
==================================================================


Here is the GNU grep home page:
    http://gnu.org/s/grep/


For a summary of changes and contributors, see:
  http://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=grep.git;a=shortlog;h=v3.8
or run this command from a git-cloned grep directory:
  git shortlog v3.7..v3.8


To summarize the 432 gnulib-related changes, run these commands
from a git-cloned grep directory:
  git checkout v3.8
  git submodule summary v3.7


==================================================================
Here are the compressed sources:
  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/grep/grep-3.8.tar.gz   (2.8MB)
  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/grep/grep-3.8.tar.xz   (1.7MB)


Here are the GPG detached signatures:
  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/grep/grep-3.8.tar.gz.sig
  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/grep/grep-3.8.tar.xz.sig


Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:
  https://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html


Here are the SHA1 and SHA256 checksums:
eb3bf741fefb2d64e67d9ea6d74c723ea0efddb6  grep-3.8.tar.gz
jeYKUWnAwf3YFwvZO72ldbh7/Pp95jGbi9YNwgvi+5c  grep-3.8.tar.gz
6d0d32cabaf44efac9e1d2c449eb041525c54b2e  grep-3.8.tar.xz
SY18wbT7CBkE2HND/rtzR1z3ceQk+35hQa/2YBOrw4I  grep-3.8.tar.xz


Each SHA256 checksum is base64 encoded, preferred over the much
longer hexadecimal encoding that most checksum tools default to.


Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the
.sig suffix) is intact.  First, be sure to download both the .sig file
and the corresponding tarball.  Then, run a command like this:


  gpg --verify grep-3.8.tar.gz.sig


The signature should match the fingerprint of the following key:


  pub   rsa4096/0x7FD9FCCB000BEEEE 2010-06-14 [SCEA]
        Key fingerprint = 155D 3FC5 00C8 3448 6D1E  EA67 7FD9 FCCB 000B EEEE
  uid   Jim Meyering 


If that command fails because you don't have the required public key,
or that public key has expired, try the following commands to retrieve
or refresh it, and then rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.


  gpg --locate-external-key jim@meyering.net
  gpg --recv-keys 7FD9FCCB000BEEEE
  wget -q -O- 'https://savannah.gnu.org/project/release-gpgkeys.php?group=grep&download=1' | gpg --import -


As a last resort to find the key, you can try the official GNU
keyring:


  wget -q https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-keyring.gpg
  gpg --keyring gnu-keyring.gpg --verify grep-3.8.tar.gz.sig


This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:
  Autoconf 2.72a.55-bc66c
  Automake 1.16i
  Gnulib v0.1-5279-g19435dc207


==================================================================
NEWS


* Noteworthy changes in release 3.8 (2022-09-02) [stable]


** Changes in behavior


  The -P option is now based on PCRE2 instead of the older PCRE,
  thanks to code contributed by Carlo Arenas.


  The egrep and fgrep commands, which have been deprecated since
  release 2.5.3 (2007), now warn that they are obsolescent and should
  be replaced by grep -E and grep -F.


  The confusing GREP_COLOR environment variable is now obsolescent.
  Instead of GREP_COLOR='xxx', use GREP_COLORS='mt=xxx'.  grep now
  warns if GREP_COLOR is used and is not overridden by GREP_COLORS.
  Also, grep now treats GREP_COLOR like GREP_COLORS by silently
  ignoring it if it attempts to inject ANSI terminal escapes.


  Regular expressions with stray backslashes now cause warnings, as
  their unspecified behavior can lead to unexpected results.
  For example, '\a' and 'a' are not always equivalent
  .  Similarly, regular expressions or
  subexpressions that start with a repetition operator now also cause
  warnings due to their unspecified behavior; for example, *a(+b|{1}c)
  now has three reasons to warn.  The warnings are intended as a
  transition aid; they are likely to be errors in future releases.


  Regular expressions like [:space:] are now errors even if
  POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, since POSIX now allows the GNU behavior.


** Bug fixes


  In locales using UTF-8 encoding, the regular expression '.' no
  longer sometimes fails to match Unicode characters U+D400 through
  U+D7FF (some Hangul Syllables, and Hangul Jamo Extended-B) and
  Unicode characters U+108000 through U+10FFFF (half of Supplemental
  Private Use Area plane B).
  [bug introduced in grep 3.4]


  The -s option no longer suppresses "binary file matches" messages.
  [Bug#51860 introduced in grep 3.5]


** Documentation improvements


  The manual now covers unspecified behavior in patterns like \x, (+),
  and range expressions outside the POSIX locale.