How to use NULL (\0) as the delimiter in GNU sort

Question

i am looking for a way to sort the results of find returning a number of directories correctly for further processing in a bash script. since filenames can't contain the NULL (\0) character i thought this would make a great delimiter for the results being piped to sort.

so this is what i would expect to work as described:

find ./ -maxdepth 1 -type d -iname 'xyz?' -print0 | sort -t $'\0'

but sadly i got the compaint sort: empty tab

looking around for a explanation a came across a question leading to a similar result that the op described as working fine (see lucas comment of apr 26th). in my case (using GNU sort v 7.4) this is seems different.

i also checked the output of find by piping into od -c but this only shows that the resulting folders are separated by NULL as expected.

has anybody here come across a similar scenario and possibly found a solution or explanation why \0 seem to be an impossible delimiter for sort?

looking forward to you answers...

edit: note that the find-command is used as an example here, a simpler way to test/illustrate this could be echo "g\0u\0b\0k" | sort -t $'\0'

Answer 1

-t is the field separator. If you want to use \0 as the line separator then you need to use -z.

Answer 2

For further processing in a Bash script see, for example:

Capturing output of find . -print0 into a bash array

# cf. http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/020
unset a i
while IFS='' read -r -d $'\0' dir; do
   a[i++]="$dir"        # or however you want to process each directory
done < <(find ./ -maxdepth 1 -type d -iname 'xyz?' -print0 | LC_ALL=C sort -z)

printf '%s\n' "${#a[@]}"
printf '%s\n' "${a[@]}"

# btw, you may use printf to add zero bytes
printf '%c\000' g u b k | sort -z | tr '\0' ' '
printf '%s\000' g1 u2 b3 k4 | sort -z | tr '\0' ' '