Hi Matthieu,
rubisetcie <[email protected]> writes:
> Hello dear developers/maintainers, I hope you're doing alright.
>
> I don't know if this is a bug, a workaround or an intended behavior, but I
> need `comm` to suppress the "delimiter".
>
> When I run the following command, in which I've set the option `
> --output-delimiter` to an empty string:
> `comm -3 --nocheck-order --output-delimiter='' file1 file2 > file3`
>
> The output `*file3*` contains *unwanted null characters* ('\0') where the
> delimiter should've been...
>
> As far as I see, there don't seem to be a way to completely disable writing
> the delimiter, whether this is intentional or not...
It is intentional. Copying text from the info page [1]:
‘--output-delimiter=str’
Print str between adjacent output columns, rather than the
default of a single TAB character.
The delimiter str may be empty, in which case the ASCII NUL
character is used to delimit output columns.
You can remove the NUL's with 'tr':
$ head -c 3 /dev/zero | od -A n -t x1
00 00 00
$ head -c 3 /dev/zero | tr -d '\0' | od -A n -t x1
Thanks,
Collin
[1]
https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/comm-invocation.html#comm-invocation
