Weird issue I’ve never seen before

Symptoms

cat /var/log/logfile.log | grep "magic"
Binary file (standard input) matches

So let’s check the file datatype:

file /var/log/logifle.log
data

What is happening?

So, somehow, a text based log file is identified as binary? It’s apparently caused by a NULL character spilled to the log

Solution

Solution is to filter out the NULL character first.

cat /var/log/logfile.log |tr -d '\000'| grep "magic"
magic