bug#8081: sort -z and shuf -z don't work

[Harald Dunkel]

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Package: coreutils
Version: 8.10


Hi folks,

According to the man page "sort -z" and "shuf -z" are supposed to
"end lines with 0 byte, not newline". This doesn't work. Example:

% ( echo 1; echo 2; echo 3 ) | tac | sort -z | xargs -0 -L 1 echo xxx
xxx 3
2
1

There are 3 line on input, so there should be 3 lines with "xxx" on
output. If I omit the -z, then it works:

% ( echo 1; echo 2; echo 3 ) | tac | sort | xargs -L 1 echo xxx
xxx 1
xxx 2
xxx 3

Please note that sort's input stream is not zero-terminated. "tac"
doesn't support this option. sort(1) doesn't mention such an
assumption, either. Obviously there are many more tools with
this restriction.

Instead of mixing input and output options I would suggest to
introduce 2 new tools "nl2zero" and "zero2nl". Sample implementation:

% alias nl2zero='tr \\n \\0'
% alias zero2nl='tr \\0 \\n'
% ( echo 1; echo 2; echo 3 ) | tac | nl2zero | sort -z | xargs -0 -L 1 echo xxx
xxx 1
xxx 2
xxx 3


Regards

Harri
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