Re: setting IFS to new line doesn't work while searching?

[Nicolas George <george@nsup.org>]

Greg Wooledge (12023-12-15):
> On Fri, Dec 15, 2023 at 01:42:14PM +0100, Nicolas George wrote:
> > Also, note that file names can also contain newlines in general. The
> > only robust delimiter is the NUL character.
> 
> True.  In order to be 100% safe, the OP's code would need to look
> more like this:
> 
>     readarray -d '' fndar < <(
>         find "$sdir" ... -printf 'stuff\0' |
>         sort -z --otherflags
>     )
> 
> The -d '' option for readarray requires bash 4.4 or higher.  If this
> script needs to run on bash 4.3 or older, you'd need to use a loop
> instead of readarray.
> 
> This may look a bit inscrutable, but the purpose is to ensure that
> a NUL delimiter is used at every step.  First, find -printf '...\0'
> will print a NUL character after each filename-and-stuff.  Second,
> sort -z uses NUL as its record separator (instead of newline), and
> produces sorted output that also uses NUL.  Finally, readarray -d ''
> uses the NUL character as its record separator.  The final result is
> an array containing each filename-and-stuff produced by find, in the
> order determined by sort, even if some of the filenames contain
> newline characters.

It is possible to do it safely in bash plus command-line tools, indeed.
But in such a complex case, it is better to use something with a
higher-level interface. I am sure File::Find and Version::Compare can
let Perl do the same thing in a much safer way.

Regards,

-- 
  Nicolas George