Re: any plans for command substitution that preserves trailing newlines?

[Chet Ramey]

On 6/1/21 5:03 PM, Christoph Anton Mitterer wrote:
> Hey again.
>
> First perhaps, in the sense of a shell variable - what exactly is it's
> content respectively a string?

Bytes.

> 3.267 Parameter doesn't says whether the content is a string in the
> sense of 3.375 or a 3.92 Character String.

It depends on how and where it's used. Some operations work on
characters, which may be composed of multiple bytes, some (e.g., printf)
work on bytes.

> On Tue, 2021-06-01 at 11:55 +0900, Koichi Murase wrote:
> > It seems the solution is also given there; set temporary LC_ALL=C
>
> Which, if it would work - and it doesn't seem to for me - would be
> quite ugly.

It would be no more `ugly' than inventing special new syntax for a limited
purpose.


> > Can someone (Chet?) confirm that the solution with adding *any*
> > character and removing it later on works (i.e. with any locale and
> > any
> > valid variable content, which is, AFAIU, anything but NUL)?

In a byte-oriented locale, using byte-oriented operations, you can remove
a byte from a string. In a locale with UTF-8 encoding you can remove a
byte with ASCII value < 128 from the end of a string, since it cannot be
part of a multibyte character.


> Well that's basically may question in the beginning of that mail: What
> is a variable intended to contain?

Only the user can speak to intent. Bash is happy to store arbitrary non-
null bytes in a variable's value.

> But even the LC_ALL workaround doesn't work for me - in the sense that
> even without I don't see a problem ^^

So you found it unnecessary. That's a strange definition of "not working" --
that you don't need to use it.

--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/