find: Newline Handling
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 its input list of files to be
separated 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.
On the other hand, if you are using the old database format, file
names with embedded newlines are not correctly handled. There is no
technical limitation which enforces this, it's just that the 'bigram'
program has not been updated to support lists of file names separated by
nulls.
So, if you are using the new database format (this is the default)
and your system uses GNU 'sort', newlines will be correctly handled at
all times. Otherwise, newlines may not be correctly handled.
Info Catalog
find: Database Formats
find: Databases