even on 'valid' binaries, it still tends to mess up your terminal. I noticed that pretty quickly when I started working with Linux. Are there really people that work with cat and grep on binaries files ?
Perhaps not intentionally, but cat has valid uses for concatenating binary files and sometimes they end up going to the terminal just by accident. As far as grep goes, the answer to your question is "yes":
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9988379/how-to-grep-a-tex...
Of course you can use grep on binaries perfectly save, if you just don't print all the results to the terminal. Use `grep -lr <pattern> <dir>` to find binaries that contain a certain pattern, use `grep --byte-offset --only-matching --text <pattern> <file>` to find the offsets in a file.