They’re both a 0, but (char) 0 is a char, while ‘\0’ is (unintuitively) an int. This type difference should not usually affect your program if the value is 0. I prefer ‘\0’, since that is the constant intended for that.
In Bash, you can’t store the NULL-character in a variable. You may, however, store a plain hex dump of the data (and later reverse this operation again) by using the xxd command. VAR1=`echo -ne “n\0m\0k” | xxd -p | tr -d ‘\n’` echo -ne “$VAR1” | xxd -r -p | od -c # -> 0000000 … Read more
The preferred way to do this is using process substitution while IFS= read -r -d $’\0′ file; do # Arbitrary operations on “$file” here done < <(find /some/path -type f -print0) If you were hell-bent on parsing a bash variable in a similar manner, you can do so as long as the list is not … Read more