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    This was super useful and works great when you don't want to ignore binary files! This works perfectly on files that are treated as binary but are files you still need to look through, whereas the accepted answer just ignores those files. Thanks! Commented Nov 6, 2020 at 4:02
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    @amaidain In what situations do you need to treat a binary as a text file? I havent used it, can you please elaborate. Commented Apr 2, 2021 at 15:56
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    @pjay One use case is when you want to read the binary logs of a database (MySQL in my case). I can decode the binary log and then I want to use grep to only keep the queries stored in the log. Using grep without --binary-files=text excludes pretty much all queries. Commented May 7, 2021 at 13:43
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    @pjay I found it occurring a lot when trying to get information from log files for various systems. Log files can have all sorts of information and when someone uses a emoji in their username the entire file can be marked as binary Commented May 8, 2021 at 16:23