All kinds of binary data might have a NUL byte. E.g. if you want to write a NUL byte to a file in the shell, you might try something like echo -n $'\0' > n

All kinds of binary data might have a NUL byte. E.g. if you want to write a NUL byte to a file in the shell, you might try something like echo -n $'\0' > nul This doesn't work for the reason stated in the article. The argument is instead interpreted as a string ended at the NUL byte and the file will be empty. BTW you can get around this with printf since it processes escape sequences internally. printf '\0' > nul