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4.3 Newline Handling

Within the database, file names are terminated with a null character. This is the case for both the old and the new format.

When the new database format is being used, the compression technique used to generate the database though relies on the ability to sort the list of files before they are presented to frcode.

If the system’s sort command allows separating its input list of files with null characters via the ‘-z’ option, this option is used and therefore updatedb and locate will both correctly handle file names containing newlines. If the sort command lacks support for this, the list of files is delimited with the newline character, meaning that parts of file names containing newlines will be incorrectly sorted. This can result in both incorrect matches and incorrect failures to match.