man 1 printf mess

[Dan Jacobson]

Fellas, doing man printf do you also see mess?

       FORMAT  controls  the  output as in C printf.  Interpreted
       sequences are:

       double quote

        NNN   character with octal value NNN (0 to 3 digits)

       \^Hb      backslash
       a
       .^Hc....  alert (BEL)
       k
       s.TP   produce no further output
       p
       a
       c^Hform feed
       e

       new line
              carriage return

              horizontal tab

       vertical tab

[GNU sh-utils 2.0           October 2000                         1]

indeed flitting by fastly on the screen were:
<standard input>:45: a newline character is not allowed in an escape name
<standard input>:48: a newline character is not allowed in an escape name
<standard input>:57: cannot use newline as a starting delimiter
<standard input>:60: warning: numeric expression expected (got `N')

which, by the way could be improved by having what part of the man
process mention its name when making these error messages... ["is it
nroff"? etc.]

by the way, doing info printf gives

   `printf' prints the FORMAT string, interpreting `%' directives and
`\' escapes in the same way as the C `printf' function.

ok, but don't you want to tell the user explicitly how to learn about
the C printf function, e.g. you could tell them to do man 3 printf...
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