Re: [Help-bash] Transform strings with special characters so that the strings don't need to be quoted?

[Greg Wooledge]

On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 02:02:10PM +0100, Stephane Chazelas wrote:
> It's really strange that no shell, not even zsh or fish fixed
> that (removing all trailing newlines instead of just only one).
> 
> The usual work around is to do
> 
> var=$(cmd && echo .) && var=${var%?} && var=${var%?}
> (to remove only one newline)
> 
> but that's obviously a pain.

In #bash we (de facto) agreed on this version:

var=$(cmd; printf x) var=${var%x}

Which is basically the same as yours, and I agree it's somewhat odd
that nobody ever came up with a shopt to stop $() stripping newlines.