Re: printf cleanup for POSIX and Bash compatibility

[Paul Eggert]

Tim Waugh <address@hidden> writes:

> Sorry there are so many, by the way -- I did try to make them fewer in
> number with the move to 4.5.x a while back.

No problem.  They indicate some other useful features that should be
in coreutils.  The biggest one (and the biggest hassle) is i18n.  I
think the patches in Fedora Core in that area have some problems,
though, and it's a bit of a pain to think through all the issues
there, though I've been meaning to make the time....


I should mention that shell commands like this:

  printf '%ld\n' 1

are not portable: POSIX doesn't require support for any length
modifiers, not even 'l'.  However, coreutils printf already supports
%ld, so I figure it might as well support %lld while we're at it, for
compatibility with Bash if nothing else.  (Perhaps the coreutils
documentation should warn about the portability problems in this sort
of usage, though.  If I have the time I'll write it up.)