title: magic bytes (or removing latest newlines from being piped)
body: <p>as i was messing with multipart messages i encountered some strange behavior evaluating the content length of multipart message bodies.</p>
  
  <p>long story short. it can be broke down to newlines being piped.</p>
  
  <pre><code>$ a="x"; b="y"
  $ echo -e "${a}" | wc -c
  2 # strange, shouldn't it be just a single byte?
  $ echo -e "${b}" | wc -c
  2 # at this point one could guess the sum is **4**, but its not
  $ echo -e "${a}${b}" | wc -c
  3
  $ echo -e "${a}${b}" | hexdump -C 
  00000000  78 79 0a  |xy.|
  00000003
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><strong>is there a possibility to avoid the magic/invisible byte being piped
  or - if not possible - at least removed?</strong></p>
  
  <p>thanks in advance.</p>