On 2008.04.17 08:44:07 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > > On Thu, 17 Apr 2008, Björn Steinbrink wrote: > > > > Debian has its own dash which is supposed to be a lightweight > > alternative to bash and "for checking POSIX compliance of scripts" > > (quote from the packages description). I don't happen to know off-hand > > whether POSIX says that echo should default to -e, but dash seems to do > > that: > > > > $ dash > > $ a="hello\nhi" > > $ echo $a > > hello > > hi > > Ahh. So that "echo" should just be replaced with a 'printf "%s\n"' > instead? > > We have a _lot_ of "echo"s though. I suspect the only ones we'd ever catch > are the ones explicitly tested for. I suspect that the dash echo is just > broken. Wow, seems that "echo" in itself is "broken". According to POSIX[1] backslashes induce implementation defined behaviour, and there seem to be two historic versions of echo, one that knows about -n and one that interprets escape sequences. So echo is totally non-portable unless you avoid -n as well as backslashes. Ouch. The POSIX docs, as well as random Google results, indeed recommend to use printf instead. But that switch seems painful as well... Björn [1] http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/echo.html -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
