Re: ldapsearch -y works great, -w barks

[ben thielsen <btb@bitrate.net>]

On Jan 28, 2012, at 13.15, Randy Schultz wrote:

> so there shouldn't have been a NL in the file, yet the 0a is there.

quite the contrary, actually.

while there may be nuances depending on which echo you're using [stand alone program for a given os or a given shell builtin], as a general rule, you need to supply -n to the command to prevent a newline from being appended.  as far as reading it back after assigning the string to a variable, that is how many shells handle words and their adjacent whitespace, bash being a popular example:

>echo 'string\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n' > pwf
>

>wc -l pwf
      12 pwf
>

>p=$(cat pwf); echo "|${p}|"
|string|
>

> Just for grins tho', your thoughts got me
> thinking.  I just ran an md5 on the file and compared it to just the string.  Well lookee here, they're
> different.  Run od on the file and !surprise - the NL shows up.


hashing the contents or printing octal representations are fine, but this can be demonstrated with just cat, on most systems:

>echo 'string' > pwf; cat pwf
string
>

>echo -n 'string' > pwf; cat pwf
string>

regards
-b