Could sed or awk use NUL character as record separator?

By default, the record separator is the newline character, defining a record to be a single line of text. You can use a different character by changing the built-in variable RS. The value of RS is a string that says how to separate records; the default value is \n, the string containing just a newline character.

 awk 'BEGIN { RS = "/" } ; { print $0 }' BBS-list

Since version 4.2.2, GNU sed has the -z or --null-data option to do exactly this. Eg:

sed -z 's/old/new' null_separated_infile

Yes, gawk can do this, set the record separator to \0. For example the command

gawk 'BEGIN { RS="\0"; FS="=" } $1=="LD_PRELOAD" { print $2 }' </proc/$(pidof mysqld)/environ

Will print out the value of the LD_PRELOAD variable:

/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libjemalloc.so.1

The /proc/$PID/environ file is a NUL separated list of environment variables. I'm using it as an example, as it's easy to try on a linux system.

The BEGIN part sets the record separator to \0 and the field separator to = because I also want to extract the part after = based on the part before =.

The $1=="LD_PRELOAD" runs the block if the first field has the key I'm interested in.

The print $2 block prints out the string after =.

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But mawk cannot parse input files separated with NUL. This is documented in man mawk:

BUGS
       mawk cannot handle ascii NUL \0 in the source or data files.

mawk will stop reading the input after the first \0 character.

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You can also use xargs to handle NUL separated input, a bit non-intuitively, like this:

xargs -0 -n1 </proc/$$/environ

xargs is using echo as the default comand. -0 sets the input to be NUL separated. -n1 sets the max arguments to echo to be 1, this way the output will be separated by newlines.

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And as Graeme's answer shows, sed can do this too.

Using sed for removing the null characters -

sed 's/\x0/ /g' infile > outfile

or make in-file substitution by doing (this will make backup of your original file and overwrite your original file with substitutions).

sed -i.bak 's/\x0/ /g' infile

Using tr:

tr -d "\000" < infile > outfile