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Re: feature request: echo --


From: Pádraig Brady
Subject: Re: feature request: echo --
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 2021 23:53:26 +0100
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:84.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/84.0

On 15/10/2021 23:37, Philip Rowlands wrote:
On Fri, 15 Oct 2021, at 18:42, Roger Pack wrote:
It came to my attention recently that it seems not possible to "echo" the
string "-e"
$ echo "-e"

Nitpick: the double quotes aren't doing anything here.

Perhaps echo could add a "--" style param like

$ echo -- -e

These are both covered by the documentation
https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/echo-invocation.html

"... the normally-special argument ‘--’ has no special meaning and is treated like 
any other string."

"If the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set, then when echo’s first argument 
is not -n it outputs option-like arguments instead of treating them as options."

Thus the way to make this work is:

$ POSIXLY_CORRECT=1 /bin/echo -e
-e

Also worth mentioning that printf(1) is preferable.
It has less edge cases and portability issues.

cheers,
Pádraig



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