Re: What is the opposite of 'printf'?

[Matthew Woehlke]

Bob Proulx wrote:
> Matthew Woehlke wrote:
> > So my original question remains... would anyone be interested in 
> > considering 'unprintf' for inclusion in coreutils? (Note: I /am/ 
> > volunteering to write and maintain it.)
>
> If your requirement is that the command must already exist on the
> system then that definitely defeats the addition of a new command.

No, my requirement is only that the /de/coder already exist. 'printf' is 
so far the only thing I have thought of that consistently /does/, but 
there is no inverse for it. So I had to write my own. (Which, btw, I 
already did; I am fishing to see if there is any interest in me 
polishing it up and sharing it.) I only need the /en/coder to produce 
the script in the first place, so whatever special tools are needed for 
that is not an issue.

Actually, I thought of another good reason for 'unprintf'; since it is 
mainly converting non-printing characters into escape sequences, it can 
easily (mostly, don't convert '%'s) be made to produce something that a 
C compiler will understand (that will produce the same data). So you 
could /also/ use it to dump raw binary data into the source code of a 
C[++] program. base64/uuencode would not work for this purpose because 
you would have to write a decoder in the program to make use of the data.

> Also uuencode/uudecode is many times more standard than some not yet
> created command.

But apparently not as standard as 'printf'. :-)
At least, not in terms of actually being installed (go figure).

--
Matthew
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