Is there a binary-safe "triple less than" <<< operator in bash?

Solution 1:

The here string redirection (<<<) is a simple form of here document redirection (<<). Here string redirection is not "binary safe"; Bash will perform expansion on the here string. In addition, Bash will append a new-line to the end of the here string (issue the command xxd -p <<< "foo" and you'll get 666f6f0a in return).

Your only safe bet, excluding pipes, is I/O redirection.

Similar not binary safe question here. You can store encoded data and try this

COMMAND_WITH_BIN_INPUT <(uudecode <(echo "$uuEncodedData")) 

however this is not far from

echo "$uuEncodedData"|uudecode|COMMAND_WITH_BIN_INPUT

but without pipe metachar.

Solution 2:

Bash isn't binary safe in general, and will corrupt nulls and newlines in variables containing binary content during substitution.

So I think the answer is "no" but more fundamentally "not in a shell scripting language" because they all seem to have problems with binary.

I'd say however you plan to get the data into $GIF, you instead get it into a file, or use python as an alternative scripting language which will handle binary data without problems.