2011-08-14, 02:43(+00), Michael Witten: [...] >> Please read BashFAQ/006: http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/006 > > "no force in the universe can put NUL bytes into shell strings usefully" > > Ain't that the goddamn Truth!
No, zsh supports NUL bytes in its strings happily. It's even in the default $IFS. Where NUL bytes can't go, it's in arguments to commmands, environment variables, filenames... But I can't see why a shell variable couldn't contain NUL bytes, it's even a good thing for both those reasons as you can use that character to safely separate filenames, arguments, env vars... See for instance the -0 option of many GNU utilities. -- Stephane
