Re: Somewhat off-topic, but hard to find better portability people.

[Peter Seebach]

In message <address@hidden>, Ralf Wildenhues writes:
>> address@hidden (Peter Seebach) wrote:
>> > I've been getting utterly stunned pretty regularly throughout.  The only
>> > system I've found so far, other than embedded systems (hi, busybox!), which
>> > doesn't have printf(1) either in the shell or in the default $PATH, is 
>> > SunOS
>> > 4 -- which I'm willing to mention once and then ignore at this point.
>
>However, even Solaris 10 /usr/bin/printf has bugs causing it to dump
>core with some arguments (which was a real pain for libtool).  Again
>quoting autoconf.info:
>
>|  Large outputs may cause trouble.  On Solaris 2.5.1 through 10, for
>|  example, `/usr/bin/printf' is buggy, so when using `/bin/sh' the
>|  command `printf %010000x 123' normally dumps core.

Specifically, "%02584d" dumps core.  Space padding doesn't; only zero-padding.

Oooh, but " %02583d" does.  Interestingly, the highest non-crashing value
for that is " %02057d".  Very magic.

-s