Could sed or awk use NUL character as record separator?

sed awk nul
user1129812 picture user1129812 · Feb 7, 2012 · Viewed 9k times · Source

I have a NUL delimited output coming from the following command :

some commands | grep -i -c -w -Z 'some regex'

The output consists of records of the format :

[file name]\0[pattern count]\0

I want to use text manipulation tools, such as sed/awk, to change the records to the following format : 

[file name]:[pattern count]\0

But it seems that sed/awk usually handles only records delimited by the "newline" character. I would like to know that how sed/awk could be used to achieve my purpose, or if sed/awk could not handle such case what other Linux tool should I use.

Thanks for any suggestion.

Lawrence

Answer

Graeme picture Graeme · Mar 22, 2014

Since version 4.2.2, GNU sed has the -z or --null-data option to do exactly this. Eg:

sed -z 's/old/new' null_separated_infile

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