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

[Bob Proulx]

Chet Ramey wrote:
> Giles Orr wrote:
> > 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".  ...
> 
> 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.

The man page shipped with Debian Stable Lenny for 3.2.39 says:

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

However on that same system this is the behavior:

  $ echo -e "\173"
  \173
  $ echo -e "\0173"
  {

I think this was simply a documentation bug that has subsequently been
addressed.

Bob