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From: gwc@root.co.uk (Geoff Clare)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Echo
Message-ID: <656@root44.co.uk>
Date: 5 Dec 88 10:45:09 GMT
References: <6557@june.cs.washington.edu> <14799@mimsy.UUCP>
Reply-To: gwc@root.co.uk (Geoff Clare)
Organization: UniSoft Ltd, London, England
Lines: 19

In article <14799@mimsy.UUCP> chris@mimsy.UUCP (Chris Torek) writes:
>
>Have echo work as in BSD; use printf(1) to produce escapes.  I tried
>to post printf to comp.sources.unix, but it seems it never made it.

- but then you lose the advantage of echo being a shell builtin.
This will have a very noticable effect on speed for scripts which print
a lot of escapes.

Personally, I think fewest existing scripts would break if the SysV
behaviour were adopted, but with the '-n' option added.  There can't
be that many BSD scripts which contain '\' in an echo string, whereas
use of '\c' in SysV scripts is extremely common.

X/Open specifies SysV behaviour for echo.  What does POSIX say?
-- 

Geoff Clare    UniSoft Limited, Saunderson House, Hayne Street, London EC1A 9HH
gwc@root.co.uk   ...!mcvax!ukc!root44!gwc   +44-1-606-7799  FAX: +44-1-726-2750