Matt Zyzik wrote:
1. I noticed bash variables don't support null characters (0x00). This is unlike perl and other languages. Will this ever change? Have people requested or wanted this feature?
Probably not; it would require considerable reworking of the variable internals.
2. $(<file) is very useful; however, there are times when I don't want any newlines chopped off. So to remedy this, I do the following: "IFS='' read -r -d '' var < file". Firstly, is this safe to do, and are there any other ways? Secondly, it appears to be very slow compared to $(<file). Any thoughts?
Probably. There will be a new builtin in bash-4.0 that will allow you to do this more easily.
3. The "+=" operator in bash seems to be slow. For instance, with my benchmarks, it is hundreds of times slower than ".=" in perl. Thoughts?
I will gladly accept performance improvements.
4. In korn shell I can put two tab characters in IFS, so that the shell treats each tab as a field delimiter (even successive ones). Will this ever be in bash?
This is incompatible with the Posix field splitting rules; bash will most likely never do things this way, even as an option. Chet -- ``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/
