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

Bonita Montero <Bonita.Montero@gmail.com> writes:

Am 26.04.2025 um 17:00 schrieb Scott Lurndal:
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Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> writes:

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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."
I wonder what's the reason behind that even-byte-alignment, on "C"
level or on Unix/files level. Any ideas?

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Possibly to support 16-bit character sets?

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Unix has a big problem that it doesn't support 16 bit character sets.

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X/Open would argue that your statement is 100% false, as unix multibyte
character sets (wchar_t, for example) have been around for three decades.