Version 2.9 of grep
Release Notes: grep's interpretation of range expression is now more consistent with that of other tools. The exit status on memory allocation failure was fixed. "grep -P" no longer aborts when PCRE's backtracking limit is exceeded. Handling of regular expressions that match multibyte characters in brackets was made faster. Other minor bugs were fixed.
Other releases
Release Notes: Several false results of "grep -i '^$'" in multi-byte locales were resolved. A misdetection of text files as binary was resolved.
Release Notes: Sparse files are now treated as binary by default. Multi-byte locales with mismatching sizes of lower- and uppercase characters are now handled properly. A fix has been made to again allow the combined use of the "--include" and "--exclude" options.
Release Notes: Recursive grep now handles large directory hierarchies much better. The "-R" option now has a long-option alias. The "-r" ("--recursive") option now follows only commandline symbolic links. Several minor bugs have been fixed.
Release Notes: Handling of very long lines as well as very long context line counts for the "-m", "-A", "-B", and "-C" options has been improved, removing some restrictions and avoiding core dumps. Recursive grep ("-r") without a file argument now defaults to using the current directory. The "--include", "--exclude", and "--exclude-dir" options now handle commandline arguments more consistently. More chances for infinite loops have been eliminated. Other minor changes and bugfixes have been made.
Release Notes: grep no longer mishandles high-bit-set pattern bytes on systems where "char" is a signed type (probably only affecting MS Windows). Command lines which potentially result in an infinite disk-filling loop are now rejected.
