Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cwjcc!hal!nic.MR.NET!uwmcsd1!marque!uunet!mcvax!ukc!stl!stc!root44!gwc 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