Subject: Re: bug#32703: echo_man_error

From: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2018 07:42:19 -0700

Pádraig Brady wrote:
>    Author: Jim Meyering<[email-masked]>
>    Date:   Thu Sep 25 12:58:50 1997 +0000
>      Make echo conform to POSIX.  By default, don't
>      interpret backslash escape sequences.
> 
> POSIX may have changed in the meantime, but POSIXLY_CORRECT
> was never used as a condition for enabling interpretation of escapes.

POSIX certainly did change in the meantime. In 1997 it was POSIX.2 (1992), 
whereas the requirements we're talking about weren't added until POSIX-2001. So 
the bug is that coreutils echo hasn't been upgraded to the new standard since 
2001 and nobody has reported this until now.