Subject: Re: bug#32703: echo_man_error

From: Eric Blake <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2018 13:07:07 -0500

On 9/11/18 11:01 AM, Eric Blake wrote:

> $ POSIXLY_CORRECT=1 /bin/echo a\\nb
> a\nb
> 
> Yikes!  Even though we asked for POSIX correctness, we are NOT 
> interpreting backslashes.  I think this is a bug in GNU coreutils' echo, 
> and could be fixed by the patch below (but the testsuite would also need 
> updates).

And it might even be a regression.  Reading through NEWS, I found this 
back in 5.3.0:

   echo now conforms to POSIX better.  It supports the \0ooo syntax for
   octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately.  If
   POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
   outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.

although I haven't actually tested prior versions to see if behavior has 
changed over time.

-- 
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc.           +1-919-301-3266
Virtualization:  qemu.org | libvirt.org