Re: bash: echoing octal, disagreement between man page and behaviour

[Chet Ramey]

Giles Orr wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> Not sure if this a bug or a documentation problem: it's certainly a
> change from previous behaviour, and a disagreement between current
> behaviour and the documentation.
> 
> The man page says that:
> 
>   $ echo -e "\173"
> 
> should produce a "{" but instead it produces a "\173".  Since
> 
>   $ echo -e "\073"
> 
> acts as behaved, producing a ";", I wondered if perhaps this would work:
> 
>   $ echo -e "\0173"
> 
> and it does, giving the expected opening brace.

I'm not sure which man page you're looking at, but the one shipped with
bash-3.2.48 includes the following in the description of "echo":

        \0nnn  the  eight-bit  character  whose value is the octal value
               nnn (zero to three octal digits)

I think that makes it pretty clear that the leading 0 is not optional.

Chet

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer

Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/