Re: printf incompatibilities with POSIX, ksh93

[Chet Ramey]

> Bash Version: 2.05b
> Patch Level: 0
> Release Status: release
> 
> Description:
> Bash's printf command has some incompatibilities with POSIX
> 1003.1-2001 and with ksh93.  Here is the POSIX incompatibility:
> 
> The remaining issues are not POSIX-conformance issues, but they are
> incompatibilities with ksh93 and with what Standard C programmers
> would expect.  Here's the first one:
> 
> $ printf '(\x07e)'
> (^Ge)
> 
> The C standard says that hexadecimal escapes can have any positive
> number of digits, and ksh93 agrees with this, so it outputs "(~)" for
> this example.

I don't know which version of ksh93 you tested this against, but the
latest available version (ksh.2003-07-24) doesn't behave like you describe:

nike.ins.cwru.edu(2)$ cat x8a
# prints more than two hex digits?
printf '\x07e\n'
nike.ins.cwru.edu(2)$ ksh93 -c 'echo ${.sh.version}'
Version M 1993-12-28 o+
nike.ins.cwru.edu(2)$ ksh93 ./x8a | od -c
0000000   \a   e  \n                                                    
0000003

Chet

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
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Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU    chet@po.cwru.edu    http://tiswww.tis.cwru.edu/~chet/