staticExec removes trailing LF which interferes with binary output that happens to end with 0xA

[qbradley]

producing binary output using staticExec can get corrupted if the last byte of the binary data happens to be 0xA (LF)

Example

const compressed = staticExec("gzip -9 -c test.dat")
# compressed.len can be one byte short in case compressed data happens to end with 0xA
# which was in fact the case for a little file I created

Possible Solution

• I understand how removing the trailing newline may be convenient in textual cases. Perhaps staticExec could optionally take a flag indicating that the output is binary, or make a new magic function that doesn't chop the LF.

$ nim -v
Nim Compiler Version 1.0.6 [Linux: amd64]
Compiled at 2020-01-23
Copyright (c) 2006-2019 by Andreas Rumpf

active boot switches: -d:release

[qbradley]

As a workaround, I'm using:

const ignored = staticExec("gzip -9 -c test.dat >/tmp/test.dat")
const compressed = staticRead("/tmp/test.dat")

[timotheecour]

unfortunately that's OS specific; see #13813 which offers a better way via simply letting you call execCmdEx (and pass whichever options to execCmdEx)

[Clyybber]

Can we still fix staticExec to simply not remove the trailing newline?

[Araq]

Let's give staticExec another default parameter.