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Re: Questions to bash "read" builtin functionality (and supposed problem


From: Linus Swälas
Subject: Re: Questions to bash "read" builtin functionality (and supposed problem with while).
Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2013 12:38:40 +0100

On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 6:57 AM, Pierre Gaston <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 4:24 PM, Linus Swälas <address@hidden>
> wrote:
>>
>> I have a similar problem to report as Fiedler Roman regarding read and
>> also
>> another problem regarding while. Maybe the while case is intended behavior
>> though. =)

>> # while can't handle nulls, this doesn't work:
>> # while read -d \x00 cfg
>> # while this does work:
>> # read -d \x00 test < <(find . -name some_file -print0) ; echo $test
>>
>
> \x00 doesn't mean anything special for bash  it's just an "x" followed by 2
> zeros (echo, printf can interpret it and it has a special meaning inside
> $'')
> Even if it did, you cannot really pass the null byte as an argument, bash
> uses null delimited string so the best you can do is to pass the empty
> string:
> read -d ''
> The good thing is that it works to read null delimited input! you need a bit
> more work to be fully safe though:
> while IFS= read -rd ''; do ..... done < <(find ... -print0)

Yes, I see that now, I managed to fool myself with vim's syntax highlighting. =)
In combination with the fact that I only find one file with no x in
it's name, and that
read then never can find it's delimiter, x in this case, gives the
appearance of not
being able to handle nulls.
That links back to the real question though, one that got overlooked,
that read seem
to discard input.
Cut from the earlier example, with superfluous comments etc removed:

        while :
        do
                # Now, read from the console, with \n as delimiter.
                read -t 2 data
                ret=$?

                # Problem is here, $data is empty when read has timed
out, i.e, not
                # read a complete line. I expect data to contain the
line read so
                # far.
                echo "$data" >&2

                [[ $ret -gt 128 ]] || continue

                # This is a futile attempt at getting the data I miss
from the timed out
                # read above, this is just to prove that the data
isn't there, even if I look
                # for these two other delimiters, I know that either
one or the other will
                # be there.
                read -d ':' -t 1 data
                # Data is still empty here ...
                if [[ -n "$data" ]]
                then
                        [[ "$data" =~ "login" ]] && return 0
                fi

                read -d '#' -t 1 data
                # ... and empty here too.
                if [[ -n "$data" ]]
                then
                        [[ "$data" =~ 'root@' ]] && return 1
                fi

                # And data is empty on the next iteration of the loop too, thus
                # read discarded the incomplete line of input, the
line that holds
                # the login: prompt. And that line does not hold a
newline so read
                # times out. And discards that data. =(

        done < "$xl_console_output"




> Pierre
> PS: next time consider trimming your use case to avoid us avoid to search
> for your problems.

Sorry, just wanted to be thorough, hope this new trimmed example is better,
and thanks for pointing out my mistake regarding while. =)

    /  Linus



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