This bugged me the last two times I looked at this function.
I don't see why we should be looking for another "newline" character.
getdelim(3) could let us use one single alternate character, but given
the signature of fparseln(3) I don't see us shoehorning that "feature"
that probably nobody would find useful.

So here's a diff to strip the related code and XXX.  ok?


Index: fparseln.c
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvs/src/lib/libutil/fparseln.c,v
diff -u -p -r1.8 fparseln.c
--- fparseln.c	4 Jan 2023 13:00:11 -0000	1.8
+++ fparseln.c	1 Nov 2025 15:15:05 -0000
@@ -66,7 +66,7 @@ fparseln(FILE *fp, size_t *size, size_t 
     int flags)
 {
 	static const char dstr[3] = { '\\', '\\', '#' };
-	char	*buf = NULL, *ptr, *cp, esc, con, nl, com;
+	char	*buf = NULL, *ptr, *cp, esc, con, com;
 	size_t	s, len = 0;
 	int	cnt = 1;
 
@@ -77,12 +77,6 @@ fparseln(FILE *fp, size_t *size, size_t 
 	con = str[1];
 	com = str[2];
 
-	/*
-	 * XXX: it would be cool to be able to specify the newline character,
-	 * but unfortunately, fgetln does not let us
-	 */
-	nl  = '\n';
-
 	while (cnt) {
 		cnt = 0;
 
@@ -101,10 +95,10 @@ fparseln(FILE *fp, size_t *size, size_t 
 				}
 		}
 
-		if (s && nl) {		/* Check and eliminate newlines */
+		if (s) {		/* Check and eliminate newlines */
 			cp = &ptr[s - 1];
 
-			if (*cp == nl)
+			if (*cp == '\n')
 				s--;	/* forget newline */
 		}
 

-- 
jca