Re: read Built-in Parameter Behavior -- Null Byte Delimiter

[Greg Wooledge]

On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 11:16:06AM -0500, Chet Ramey wrote:
> On 1/18/16 8:14 AM, Greg Wooledge wrote:
> > I suspect the interpretation of -d '' to mean a NUL byte delimiter
> > may have been an accident originally (but that's a guess).
> 
> I guess that depends on what you mean by `accident'.

Happy coincidence, then.

> It's not a special case that needs to be documented as such.  It's a
> straightforward application of the rules for assigning the delimiter
> and reading it.  You do have to understand how C strings work and how
> they are used when passing arguments to commands for it to make sense.

Other shells must go out of their way to suppress it, then.

wooledg@wooledg:~$ while IFS= read -r -d '' foo; do echo "<$foo>"; done < 
<(printf 'one\0two\0')
<one>
<two>
wooledg@wooledg:~$ ksh
$ while IFS= read -r -d '' foo; do echo "<$foo>"; done < <(printf 'one\0two\0')
$ while IFS= read -r -d x foo; do echo "<$foo>"; done < <(printf 'onextwox')   
<one>
<two>