On Wed, Dec 19, 2012 at 04:49:32PM -0500, Chet Ramey wrote: > I get the same results if I run the pipeline in an interactive shell. > This is pretty much what I expect. The whitespace and newlines will > disappear due to read's $IFS processing if they're first or last in > the string.
Which is why you typically want: IFS= read -r foo This is especially true when you're reading N bytes at a time and need them preserved verbatim. (You can also use -d '' to suppress stopping on a newline character, if that helps.)
