Re: Rationale for aligning data on even bytes in a Unix shell file?

On 27.04.2025 01:35, Kaz Kylheku wrote:

On 2025-04-26, Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> wrote:

In a "C" file (of the Kornshell software) I stumbled across this
comment: "Each command in the history file starts on an even byte
and is null-terminated."

[...]
 
The alignment could be of help if you're looking at the file
with "od -tx2a".

Well, the intention was more to get some better readable text from
ksh's history file. That annoyed me for long, and when I recently
read in CUS Kenny's question about GNU grep and \0 it reminded me
to have a closer look into ksh's format. As Keith mentioned, we do
not have *that* issue with Bash's format, but for Ksh I'd like to
have some tools (e.g. a grep, editing macros, etc.) to handle such
files in a simpler (text-)way (without touching its native format).

As it seems Ksh's history format (while "binary") is quite primitive
so it won't be a big deal, I suppose; skip the markers and split on
the nulls.

Janis