URL:
<http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?18320>
Summary: Zero bytes in input should give warning
Project: findutils
Submitted by: epaepa
Submitted on: Friday 17/11/06 at 17:15
Category: xargs
Severity: 3 - Normal
Item Group: None
Status: None
Privacy: Public
Assigned to: None
Originator Name:
Originator Email:
Open/Closed: Open
Release: 4.2.27
Fixed Release: None
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Details:
In Unix, command line arguments passed to a process are NUL-terminated. So
it is not possible for an argument string to contain a NUL character. xargs
ought to warn about this. To reproduce:
% perl -e 'print "a", chr(0), "b"' | xargs echo
Actual result: echo prints 'a' on the console
Desired result: xargs gives a warning something like
NUL character found in input, cannot be passed through to argument list (did
you mean to use the -0 flag?)
For backwards compatibility, xargs could do what it effectively does now and
truncate the argument at the first NUL byte. But it shouldn't do so
silently.
More exotic solutions would be to strip out the NULs, or treat them as
whitespace, but I don't think this is justified.
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