Pipe to grep not working in zsh

Question

I am doing something I always do in Bash:

set | grep -i path 

and the output is

Binary file (standard input) matches

What's wrong? grep --help works, and set | more works too.

Answer 1

Do this:

set > /tmp/zshset

Then open /tmp/zshset in your favorite editor. Look for IFS.

The default value for this, per the zshparam man page, is default space, tab, newline and NUL. This last one is causing the trouble. grep sees the NUL (ascii 0, displayed often as ^@) and thinks that this is a binary file.

Possible solutions:

• Set IFS to some other value. This might cause problems if something else you do expects that NUL is a valid delimiter.
• Use grep -a as suggested by KeithB (or its equivalent --binary-files=text)
• Create a new alias for yourself which uses grep -a to save yourself a little bit of typing
• Adapt to looking at your PATH through other means (e.g. env | grep -i path, echo $PATH) -- I think the other solutions are simpler

Answer 2

I'm not sure what is going on, but you can pass the -a flag to grep to force it to treat its input as text, regardless of what it thinks that it is.