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

[alex xmb sw ratchev]

On Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 15:29 Chet Ramey <chet.ramey@case.edu> wrote:

> 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.
>

additional metadata , that keeps internally track of \0 positions , for
like printf or so later ..

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/
>
>