is there a way to use a work buffer in Linux bash? ...

[Albretch Mueller]

It comes really handy whenever you need to work with a buffer of bytes more 
than once. No extra objects created.
I think internally bash does have such things. Otherwise how could two strings 
be compared?
As an equivalent to ANSI C's memcpy and memmove in java they use 
java.lang.System.arraycopy
lbrtchx