Question

can someone tell me why sed won’t remove my NULLs?

this is on OS X

$ printf '123\x00456' | sed 's/\x00/Z/g' | hexdump 
0000000 31 32 33 00 34 35 36 0a                        

this doesn’t work either:

$ printf '123'$(echo "\000")'456' | sed 's/'$(echo "\000")'/Z/g' | hexdump 
0000000 31 32 33 00 34 35 36 0a

Answer 1

For deleting a single character or translating a single character to a single other character (not including multibyte characters), tr can do it, and unlike sed it supports all characters, including NULs, in all versions of unix since the beginning.

For translating:

tr '\0' Z

And for deleting:

tr -d '\0'