Question

I am using grep to produce output that will be parsed by another program.

However, that program expects output only to be numeric or zero-bytes.

Now grep outputs a newline character after its output. I’ve checked the -Z option but it doesn’t seem to work as I’m using grep for counting (-c).

I am executing in sh, not bash. So nesting it into echo -n "$(grep -c pattern)" doesn’t work either.

How can I get rid off the trailing newline?

Answer 1

You can pipe it through tr and translate the \n to a \0 character:

tr '\n' '\0'