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.
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.
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. See 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.
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.