I'm on Ubuntu and I typed cat .bash_history | grep git and it returned
Binary file (standard input) matches
My bash_history does exist and there are many lines in it that starts with git.
What caused it to display this error and how can I fix it?
You can use grep -a 'pattern'.
from man grep page:
-a, --text
Process a binary file as if it were text; this is equivalent to the --binary-files=text option.
-z flag to match across several lines.
Presumably the file .bash_history starts with non-text data, hence grep is treating the file as binary. This is confirmed by the file .bash_history output:
.bash_history: data
You can read a few bytes from start to have a conforming view:
head -c1K .bash_history
Here I am reading first 1 KiB.
You can pipe the STDOUT to hexdump/od or similar.
As a side note, grep takes filename(s) as argument, so cat is useless here; try this:
grep git .bash_history
head -c1k .bash_history read the first 38 lines of my .bash_history file. Everything was readable
Commented
Jan 8, 2017 at 5:22
grep -a git .bash_history?
-a do?
Commented
Jan 8, 2017 at 5:31
This can be caused by null bytes in your bash history. Removing lines with null characters may resolve the issue. You can check for them using grep's Perl-regexp mode:
grep -Pa '\x00' .bash_history
This post has suggestions for non-unix systems.
I had the same problem when I want to grep my .bash_history. (Little Note: I renamed my history, so that a new one was created. This new history was not treated as a binary.)
In @heemayls answer it is stated, that grep takes filenames and cat would be useless. This is not entirely true.
From greps man page:
If no files are specified, or if the file “-” is given, grep searches standard input.
So you could use cat and pipe it to grep. However this solves not the problem that .bash_history is treated as a binary. The only right thing is to use grep -a (Like in the answer from @AK_) whether you grep the history directly or with cat and a pipe.
cat .bash_history | grep -a git
or
grep -a git .bash_history
Error is due to the data in the file being binary, you can use strings command to see the human readable (i.e. strings) part which you would normally search using grep
strings data | grep -i whatever
file .bash_history(file ~/.bash_history)?.bash_history: data