* Roland Rosenfeld said:
> Herbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au> wrote:
>
> > Before ash appeared, Debian/GNU Linux supported stuff like the
> > function keyword, {} substitution, and a host of other things. That
> > certainly did not give me any impetus to do those things in ash. Why
> > should this be any different?
>
> I agree with you in the question of "echo -e", but I still have a
-e is purely a cosmetical option as it stands now that we know that POSIX
makes the escape sequences the default. What's annoying is the lack of an
argument to switch the escapes OFF.
> problem with "echo -n". We need some way to output a line without a
> trailing linefeed from a /bin/sh script. So the question is, _how_
> this way should look like. Have a look at our policy, which
printf is a solution, that's true, but most programmers shall continue to
use echo -n for the sake of tradition and habit for one.
> explicitly proposes to use "echo -n" in many examples like this:
Not to mention the ash manpage which also has examples with "echo -n"
[snip]
> You told us to always use printf(1) as an alternative, but is this an
> acceptable alternative? Can we be sure, that printf(1) is always
> available (at the moment it located in /usr/bin, which makes it
With (b)ash it's a non-issue - both have printf builtin. But the problem is
not that printf is bad, but that lack of 'echo -n' is, at this moment, very
bad and that removal of the argument is not justified by any standard.
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