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Re: Mapping text files
From: |
Paul Eggert |
Subject: |
Re: Mapping text files |
Date: |
Wed, 20 Sep 2006 11:54:42 -0700 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.1008 (Gnus v5.10.8) Emacs/21.4 (gnu/linux) |
Bruce Korb <address@hidden> writes:
> If valid data is supposed to be ASCII text, then what meaning
> do you give to the NUL byte?
It depends on the application. The NUL character is valid in
ASCII. For 'sort', for example, it participates in comparison
as the least-possible character.
> If a data file has random trash in it
I guess one person's trash is another's treasure. I can easily see
how NUL bytes might be used by standard utilities, e.g.,
"sort -t '\0' -k 2".
> the correct response is something along the lines of EINVAL
> whenever strlen(filedata) != filestat.st_size.
The GNU coding standards disagree: they say "Utilities reading files
should not drop NUL characters".