On Mon, Jan 13, 2025 at 04:11:46 -0500, Lawrence Velázquez wrote:
> What exactly is all of this supposed to demonstrate? mapfile has
> the same terminator-not-separator behavior everyone is kvetching
> about:
>
> $ printf 'a:b:c:' | { mapfile -td:; declare -p MAPFILE; }
> declare -a MAPFILE=([0]="a" [1]="b" [2]="c")
>
> Reading a line and splitting it into an array like this is what
> read -a is for.
Yeah. It does what you expect if and only if the delimiter is the
default newline character (or a NUL). If it's anything else, you run
into the same issue this thread has been discussing for days.
In a previous message, I mentioned that field terminators didn't seem
like a common choice in any kind of data files. I forgot that text files
sort of fit this mold: every line, including the final one, is supposed
to be terminated by a newline character.
Unfortunately, you can't actually use the shell's word splitting to
separate a text file into a list of lines, *except* by using mapfile.
Any other choice runs into either the "leading/trailing IFS whitespace
gets trimmed" feature, or the "command substitution strips trailing
newlines" feature.
