Re: human-readable / block-size as a general utility?

[Eric Blake]

On 08/18/2011 08:57 AM, Pádraig Brady wrote:
> Oops I meant %H.
> Even though a capital I discounted it as there are others used:
> http://www.pixelbeat.org/programming/gcc/format_specs.html

I don't know of anything using %H, so that would indeed be viable, if we 
wanted to make printf(1) the way to expose conversion of a number into 
human-readable form.

> > Meanwhile, although both the bash builtin and coreutils' printf parse these two 
> > formats, they actually still end up widening to int before printing; arguably a 
> > bug:
> >
> > $ printf %hhx -1
> > ffffffffffffffff
> > $ echo 'format(%hx,-1)' | m4

Typo - I meant %hhx in this example.

> > ff
>
> I'd agree that's a bug.
> I also notice that neither solaris or freebsd support %h

POSIX does not require %h support in printf(1), only in printf(3).  And 
gnulib lists which platforms have incomplete printf(3) support, 
including %h support as one of its tests.

--
Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org