Subject: RFE: process-lines equivalent for NUL-separated output

From: Tim Landscheidt <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Sep 2025 11:27:34 +0000

Severity: wishlist

The function process-lines executes a program and returns
the lines of its output as a list.  However using newlines
as output separators is prone to errors, and therefore many
programs support using NUL (?\C-@) to separate their output.

Currently, with Emacs one needs to use constructs like:

| (split-string
|  (shell-command-to-string
|   (concat "foo "
|           (shell-quote-argument "bar baz")))
|  "\0"
|  t)

It would be nice if Emacs shipped a function so that the
above could be rewritten as:

| (process-output "foo" "bar baz")