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Date:      Thu, 11 Nov 1999 19:12:47 -0600
From:      Dan Nelson <dnelson@emsphone.com>
To:        Paul Eggert <eggert@twinsun.com>
Cc:        tstromberg@rtci.com, freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG, bug-gnu-utils@gnu.org
Subject:   Re: Bad 'grep' behaviour in -CURRENT, faulty binary detection?
Message-ID:  <19991111191247.A6353@dan.emsphone.com>
In-Reply-To: <199911120028.QAA06638@shade.twinsun.com>; from eggert@twinsun.com on Thu, Nov 11, 1999 at 04:28:53PM -0800
References:  <382B2711.E13A1CC8@rtci.com> <199911120028.QAA06638@shade.twinsun.com>

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In the last episode (Nov 11), Paul Eggert said:
> Most likely this is because the output of your `set' command contains
> binary data.  In the past, this has been reported by people whose `set'
> command would output something like this:
> 
> IFS='   
> ^@'
> 
> where the `^@' in my message denotes a single NUL byte (control-@) in
> the original.  If this is what's happening to you, then this is quite
> possibly a bug in your shell, since environment variables cannot
> possibly contain NUL bytes in Unix.

Aah, but 'set' prints the value of all shell variables, exported or
not.  You can store any value in a shell variable. In fact, I do things
like this quite often (/bin/sh example here - zsh can do the same
without forking to set a):

a=$(cat file.gif) 
size=${#a}
echo Content-Length: $size
echo Content-Type: image/gif
echo
echo -n $a

I agree that _environment_ variables can't have NULs in them.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson@emsphone.com


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