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

[Chet Ramey]

Giles Orr wrote:
> Hi Chet, Bob.
> 
> I see what the problem is, and yes, it appears to be documentation
> rather than a "bug."  My apologies.  However, in the copy I have of
> the man page (I run Debian testing, whatever is default with that and
> possibly not up-to-date with the latest version of Bash ...  The octal
> thing is mentioned in at least two places and they don't agree.  Under
> the section for "echo" it says "\0nnn", but under the section
> "QUOTING" it discusses backslash escape sequences and gives octal as
> "\nnn".  Since I just searched for "octal" on the man page, I hit the
> "QUOTING" section first.

The section you found describes the $'...' ANSI-C quoting extension.  It's
not specified by Posix, and bash and ksh93 implement it the same way (like
ANSI-C).

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

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