On 04/07/2014 06:11 PM, Pádraig Brady wrote:

> 
> If we had to make it explicit for backwards compat reasons,
> then I suppose counting by characters is the least useful,
> so we could just standardize the existing ksh behavior and have:
> 
>    printf '%3s' 'blah'  # count bytes
>    printf '%3Ls' 'blah' # count cells
>    LANG=C '%3Ls' 'blah' # count bytes

If we add %3Ls to the shell, we should also add it to libc's printf(3),
which means coordinating with the C committee.

> 
> This has the disadvantage of not degrading gracefully
> on dash for example where %Ls is rejected.

If a future version of the standard mandates behavior for %Ls, I suspect
dash would be made compliant fairly quickly - the dash maintainers
strive hard to comply with POSIX.

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org