Jim Meyering wrote on 10/26/2009 08:43 PM:
Pádraig Brady wrote:
Eric Blake wrote:
Since environment variables may contain newlines, but env and printenv
currently separate output entries via newline, we have a case of ambiguous
output. For example, "env | sed -n '/^a.*=/ s,=.*,,p'" does not necessarily
tell you the set of environment variables beginning with "a", because I could
have done "export b=$'\na=c'". What do list readers think of the idea of
adding:
env -0/--null
printenv -0/--null
as a means of unambiguously representing the current contents of the
environment with NUL terminators instead of newlines?
It's consistent and makes sense.
I've not needed it myself (I think :)),
but I would say it's worth adding.
I'm on the fence, partly because you can simulate printenv -0 with this:
perl -e 'print map {"$_=$ENV{$_}\0"} keys %ENV'
You can simulate env -0 the same way.
Certainly, env -0 and printenv -0 are easier to type and use.
Not strongly for or against.
... ah, Jim, but this is /core/utils no?
Wouldn't you agree therefore that historically as well
as OS-constitutionally coreutils are more fundamental
than perl? And, perhaps, therefore --at least in this
case-- it has no business of referring to a youngster
like perl? ;-)
In short, personally, my hand's up for the proposition,
given the example.
bjd
