On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 11:00:50PM -0500, Matthew Story wrote: > bash-4.2$ printf 'foo\0bar\0' | while read -d '' line; do echo "$line"; done > foo > bar > > I find this behavior incongruent with what I expect from setting things like > IFS to empty string (e.g. delim is every character), but it seems like it is > already in use.
It's extraordinarily useful. It allows you to do things like this: while IFS= read -rd '' file; do ...; done < <(find . -type f -print0) Setting IFS to the empty string actually means that no word splitting or trimming will be performed at all. It does *not* mean that word splitting happens on every character. > I have a patch to make terminate input line after every character for -d '', > and after null-byte on -d '\0', if you are interested in that functionality, > I'll send that patch for your consideration as well. There are many bash scripts in use already that rely on read -d '' to work the way it does. Switching the behavior of -d '' and introducing -d '\0' in its place would require rewriting all of those scripts. The final decision is Chet's, but losing the ability to read a NUL-delimited stream would be a huge problem for me. Neither POSIX sh nor ksh has the ability to handle NUL-delimited input, as far as I have been able to determine. I don't know zsh, so maybe it does, or maybe not.
