Re: read command and ascii null as delimiter

[Chet Ramey]

Nathan Coulter wrote:
> Feature request: an option, maybe "-0" to use ascii null as the delimiter for 
> the "read" command.  It would make the following two commands produce the 
> same output:
> 
> pooryorick@debian:~/tmp5$ printf 'hello\000there' | xargs -n1 -0 echo
> hello
> there
> 
> pooryorick@debian:~/tmp5$ printf 'hello\000there' | { while read -0 ; do echo 
> $REPLY; done; }

read -d $'\0' will do most of what you want, with one limitation.  The
read builtin accepts only one eol delimiter, so either you ensure that
the input ends with a NUL or you pick up the final portion of the input
in $REPLY after read returns status 1 upon encountering EOF.

Chet
-- 
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Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/