Re: portability of 'printf' command

[Karl Berry]

    And the reason that I would _like_ to have printf(1) added to the list
    of portable tools is because of the number of non-portable shell scripts
    that are currently using 'echo -n', which is doomed to failure in some
    shells, instead of printf because printf was not listed in the permitted
    tools.

About that, echo -n was and never will be portable, have to go through
the tests of -n vs. \c, etc.  I doubt that's news to anyone here :).

I seem to recall that we've already given up on explicitly testing other
things lacking in SunOS 4, though the specifics elude me. 

In any event, I suspect that anyone using such an ancient system *and*
installing a brand-new version of package foo that uses printf in its
autoconfery would also have installed coreutils (or at least sh-utils),
and therefore will have printf after all.

So I'm not seeing a strong argument against this.  Barring objections,
I'll send it on to rms ... except I'll be offline until next Tuesday, so
don't expect anything before next week.

Thanks,
Karl