Re: Test failures with GNU grep 2.23

On Fri, Feb 19, 2016 at 09:38:17AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

Yeah, I'd worry that "-a" is not portable. OTOH, BSD grep seems to have
it, so between that and GNU, I think most systems are covered. We could
do:

  test_lazy_prereq GREP_A '
	echo foo | grep -a foo
  '

and mark these tests with it. I'd also be happy to skip that step and
just do it if and when somebody actually complains about a system
without it (I wouldn't be surprised if most people on antique systems
end up installing GNU grep anyway).

Another option might be using "sed -ne '/^author/p'" or similar. But
that may very well just be trading one portability problem for another.

Would $PERL help, I wonder?

It would, though I think you would need to call `binmode` to make it
reliable. I was hesitant to suggest it, because I seem to recall some
resistance to more perl dependencies in the test suite, but I think we
may be past the point of no return there, anyway.

-Peff