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. Lines: 19 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.