File: grep.info,  Node: Other Options,  Prev: File and Directory Selection,  Up: Command-line Options

2.1.7 Other Options
-------------------

‘--’
     Delimit the option list.  Later arguments, if any, are treated as
     operands even if they begin with ‘-’.  For example, ‘grep PAT --
     -file1 file2’ searches for the pattern PAT in the files named
     ‘-file1’ and ‘file2’.

‘--line-buffered’
     Use line buffering for standard output, regardless of output
     device.  By default, standard output is line buffered for
     interactive devices, and is fully buffered otherwise.  With full
     buffering, the output buffer is flushed when full; with line
     buffering, the buffer is also flushed after every output line.  The
     buffer size is system dependent.

‘-U’
‘--binary’
     On platforms that distinguish between text and binary I/O, use the
     latter when reading and writing files other than the user's
     terminal, so that all input bytes are read and written as-is.  This
     overrides the default behavior where ‘grep’ follows the operating
     system's advice whether to use text or binary I/O.  On MS-Windows
     when ‘grep’ uses text I/O it reads a carriage return-newline pair
     as a newline and a Control-Z as end-of-file, and it writes a
     newline as a carriage return-newline pair.

     When using text I/O ‘--byte-offset’ (‘-b’) counts and
     ‘--binary-files’ heuristics apply to input data after text-I/O
     processing.  Also, the ‘--binary-files’ heuristics need not agree
     with the ‘--binary’ option; that is, they may treat the data as
     text even if ‘--binary’ is given, or vice versa.  *Note File and
     Directory Selection::.

     This option has no effect on GNU and other POSIX-compatible
     platforms, which do not distinguish text from binary I/O.

‘-z’
‘--null-data’
     Treat input and output data as sequences of lines, each terminated
     by a zero byte (the ASCII NUL character) instead of a newline.
     Like the ‘-Z’ or ‘--null’ option, this option can be used with
     commands like ‘sort -z’ to process arbitrary file names.