Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!mit-eddie!ll-xn!ames!amdcad!sun!quintus!ok
From: ok@quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Echo
Message-ID: <801@quintus.UUCP>
Date: 2 Dec 88 18:27:30 GMT
References: <6557@june.cs.washington.edu> <1988Dec1.214552.18211@utzoo.uucp>
Sender: news@quintus.UUCP
Reply-To: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Inc.
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In article <1988Dec1.214552.18211@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
[about "echo"]
>Having the escapes available actually turns out to be surprisingly handy,
>or at least that's been our experience.

>Actually you can't echo an *arbitrary* string with any of the current
>echos, since strings like "-n" tend to have surprising effects even in
>otherwise-innocuous versions, but that's a lesser problem.

These are some of the reasons why I wrote "lit" and posted it to the net.
	lit [-n] [-d{clist}] [-e{char}] arg ...
(The -dxyz stuff lets you specify something other than blanks between
the arguments, e.g. "lit -d: foo baz ugh" => "foo:baz:ugh".)  And of
course it supports "--" as end-of-options, so "lit -- -n" works.

Not the least of the reasons for the -e option is that when you are
going through several layers of string interpretation (e.g. the shell
script is written by a C program) it is just too painful when all of
the layers use the same escape character.