Re: document that read built-in can't return zero-length string in the middle of input

[Chet Ramey]

On 1/11/24 2:37 AM, ilya Basin wrote:
> Dear.
> I needed to read 16 bytes from a binary file and tried to replace a hexdump call with 
> read built-in. I expected that with "-N1" if a NUL character is encountered 
> bash would assign an empty string, however there's no indication that a NUL character was 
> there and it simply assigns the next non-NUL character to the variable.

The read builtin skips over NUL characters because you can't store them
as part of the value of a shell variable. That seems obvious.

What would you like to see documented? That NUL characters don't count
towards the number of characters read to satisfy -N? Doesn't that follow
from the above?

--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/

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