Eric Sunshine <sunshine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > So, for the commit message, perhaps simply: > > Extend the shell-scripting section of CodingGuidelines to suggest > octal escape sequences (e.g. "\302\242") over hexadecimal > (e.g. "\xc2\xa2") since the latter can be a source of portability > problems. > > As for the change to CodingGuidelines, this would probably be sufficient: > > Use octal escape sequences (e.g. "\302\242"), not hexadecimal > (e.g. "\xc2\xa2"), since the latter is not portable across some > commands, such as `printf`, `sed`, `tr`, etc. I'd prefer singling out `printf`, actually, and not talking about "across some commands". As I said in a separate message, we certainly do *not* want to rely on `echo` interpreting bs-escaped octal sequences without '-e', even though it may be expected on a POSIX systems, because it is not portable across systems our users commonly encounter. And `printf` has been what we chose to turn bs-escaped octal sequence into binary. I'd prefer not having to even worry about `sed`, `tr`, etc. behaving differently and not allowing to expect these other commands to be usable for turning bs-escaped octal sequence into binary would be one way to achieve that goal. Thanks.
