On 25 Nov 2009, at 14:58, Antonio Macchi wrote: > my goal is very very stupid, like this > > $ printf "%q" $(</bin/ls) > > to get a "ascii form" of a binary file (something like uuencode) > > > but, as you can see, it does not work only for two binary chars > > 0x00, and 0x0a
That doesn't sound like a goal; more like an approach to achieve some other goal. 1. Remember to quote your expansions: "$(..)" 2. You can't put binaries in arguments for the very reason you just encountered: Arguments cannot hold NUL bytes. If you state the true goal (why are you trying to convert binary files into some sort of undefined form?) perhaps a more appropriate suggestion can be made. printf doesn't read from a stream, so you can't use it to %q-encode your binary data directly. Though %q-encoding binary data sounds like an odd requirement. You did mention uuencode so I assume you considered that already as well as base64 encoding and found it insufficient. Which leaves me wondering what you could possibly be trying to do.
