> On 25 Nov 2009, at 08:19, Antonio Macchi wrote: > > Hi, I'm using older bash 3.2.39, so please forgiveme if in your newer bash > > this issue does not arise.
On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 08:25:00AM +0100, Maarten Billemont wrote: > As for NUL out outputting anything in your result, the cause is C-strings. > Arguments are C-strings and those are delimited by NUL bytes. Therefore, the > NUL byte that you're putting in it is actually marking the end of the string. > So the argument ends BEFORE your NUL byte. So it's empty. > > As or \x0a, that's a newline. And command substitution trims trailing > newlines. So a string "[newline]" gets trimmed to "". If the goal is to get content including trailing newlines into a bash variable using printf, then Antonio can use printf -v: imadev:~$ printf -v myvar '%q\n' $'\x0a' imadev:~$ echo "$myvar" $'\n' (Note blank line in the output -- one newline from the echo command, and one from the actual content of $myvar.) Using printf -v instead of x=$(printf) means you don't suffer from the trailing-newline-removal that command substitution does. I'm a bit puzzled by the original e-mail, though. I don't see what the actual goal is. If the goal is simply "put a newline character into a variable", then this is even simpler: myvar=$'\n'
