Re: Trailing newlines disappear

[Pierre Gaston]

On Fri, Jun 9, 2017 at 8:40 PM, Peter & Kelly Passchier <
peterkelly@passchier.net> wrote:

> On 09/06/2560 23:38, L A Walsh wrote:
> > Chet Ramey wrote:
> >>
> >>  Should mapfile silently drop the NULs?
> >
> > Maybe add a flag to ignore NUL bytes that could be used in the 'read'
> > statement as well?  If not specified, keep same behavior?
>
> That sounds like it might be useful.
> It might be more desirable to change it to a newline instead of dropping
> it? (Or both, with different flags??)
>

I feel this kind of magic behavior would result in hackish scripts or fill
a somewhat rare niche at best.
I'd rather have bash to fully handle arrays of byte, or nothing.


> And how about a shell option to not omit trailing newlines in command
> substitutions?? I find that very undesirable and unnecessary behaviour.
>
> Peter
>
> I would argue that dropping the trailing newlines is what most use and
want.
Even if they don't realize it, few people would expect:

var=$(wc -l file);echo "$var"

to print 2 lines.

Trailing newlines are often not that interesting.