tr on OS X

[Brandon Allbery]

On Apr 3, 2010, at 03:46 , Scott Haneda wrote:
> Just out of curiosity, if I wanted to do something like:
> $cat /dev/random | tr "a" "b"
>
> How do I get `tr` to work?  I do not see anything in the man page  
> that would allow me to treat the binary data as correctly.

$ LANG=C tr a b </dev/random

If a multibyte localization is configured (OSX and most Linuxes  
default to UTF8, which is a variable length encoding) then tr will  
become annoyed when it sees illegal character sequences.  In single- 
byte encodings like ISO8859/1 you're probably fine as long as you  
don't use things like [:upper:], but LANG=C disables all of this and  
processes the data as a raw stream of bytes.

tr on many systems was until recently not locale-aware because it was  
designed internally to deal with bytes, not characters.  Recent GNU  
tr, and BSD tr (which is what OSX uses), were rewritten to be locale- 
capable. and therefore trip over the illegal-UTF8-sequences problem  
when used on binary data unless LANG=C is used to disable all locale  
processing.

-- 
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery at kf8nh.com
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery at ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university    KF8NH



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