You have whetted my apetite again... ;o)

There is possibly one _bug_ I can see in both my and your attempts is character 92, "\"
causing a pseudo escape on the next binary character it sees when running an
"somevar=echo -e......" into it more than once.

It also seems your 0x09 and 0x0A become NULL too.

I can understand why 0x0A _might_ occur but not 0x09, (Tab).
On a binary file with single byte zero(s) uisng the default bash "read", yes, but on a
binary_string_variable, hmmm, hard to judge as placing byte zero into a variable is
not possible at this point.

Ignoring "read" FTTB I am going to try and force byte zero into the middlie of
a "Hello World." string, i.e. the space replaced with 0x00...

---------- Post updated 07-09-13 at 11:21 AM ---------- Previous update was 06-09-13 at 10:58 PM ----------

Hi DGPickett...
I tried this out from the command line and......

Code:

Last login: Sat Sep  7 10:17:43 on ttys000
AMIGA:barrywalker~> text="Hello World."
AMIGA:barrywalker~> text=${text/ /"\0"}
AMIGA:barrywalker~> echo ${#text}
13
AMIGA:barrywalker~> echo -n $text > /tmp/txt
AMIGA:barrywalker~> hexdump -C /tmp/txt
00000000  48 65 6c 6c 6f 5c 30 57  6f 72 6c 64 2e           |Hello\0World.|
0000000d
AMIGA:barrywalker~> echo -e -n $text > /tmp/txt
AMIGA:barrywalker~> hexdump -C /tmp/txt
00000000  48 65 6c 6c 6f 00 57 6f  72 6c 64 2e              |Hello.World.|
0000000c
AMIGA:barrywalker~> echo -e "$text"
HelloWorld.
AMIGA:barrywalker~> echo "$text"
Hello\0World.
AMIGA:barrywalker~> read newtext < /tmp/txt
AMIGA:barrywalker~> echo $newtext
Hello
AMIGA:barrywalker~> echo ${#newtext}
5
AMIGA:barrywalker~> # 0x00 always strips anything after it...
AMIGA:barrywalker~>
AMIGA:barrywalker~> echo -n $text > /tmp/txt
AMIGA:barrywalker~> read newtext < /tmp/txt
AMIGA:barrywalker~> echo $newtext
Hello0World.
AMIGA:barrywalker~> echo ${#newtext}
12
AMIGA:barrywalker~> hexdump -C /tmp/txt
00000000  48 65 6c 6c 6f 5c 30 57  6f 72 6c 64 2e           |Hello\0World.|
0000000d
AMIGA:barrywalker~> _

"read" has brought in the correct length of "Hello World.", 12, with the space shown as
character 0, but its file length is actually 13 characters in size...

So to return back to 13 characters again using pseudo-zero 2 backslashes will be needed
inside the file now making the file length 14.

This is a real killer for binary_string to file and back again manipulation.
I think the only way to account for binary zero is to use "\0" two characters and detect
those two characters inside the binary_string something like this...

Code:

if [ "${binary_string:$some_position:2}" == "\0" ]
then
        echo "\0 at position $some_position in binary string."
        # Do other binary string manipulation as required.
fi

The problem is that there may be two genuine independent "\" and "0" characters side
by side and not related to binary zero at all, just independent characters...

This is getting more difficult by the day... ;o)