On 13 May 2011, at 20:07, DJ Mills wrote: > A -0 option, or even an option to use a different field separator, would be > an > excellent feature for mapfile. Currently, of course, you can use: > > while IFS= read -rd '' file; do array+=("$file"); done > > mapfile is considerably faster, however, and I think this would be quite > handy.
seconded. I'm not sure why it only works for lines. Sure, on the shell data is often line-based, but more often than that, line-based parsing is bad and should be done with a safe delimiter rather than \n instead.