Oh, you can pass arbitrary strings, you just can't pass arbitrary strings as part of compound datastructures. The closest you can get is using null or some othe

Oh, you can pass arbitrary strings, you just can't pass arbitrary strings as part of compound datastructures. The closest you can get is using null or some other weird character to separate lines ($RS='\0' in awk), and something similar for field separation (like -0 in find, which is $FS='\0' in awk). But \0 is only one special character, so you need another one.