"Gorka Guardiola" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > The fix doesn't break anything, ...
Any change in externally visible behavior could in principle "break something" that had relied on the previous behavior. That said, "echo" has historically been a problem since without support for option arguments it is too limited, but with support for option arguments one has to worry about accidental options, as in the original question. With incomplete support for option arguments it is just confusing. I got disgusted enough with the variety among versions of "echo" that impacted upon otherwise portable shell scripts that I designed my own version that supports the Unix command syntax standard, is flexible enough to provide all the useful option behavior modifications (including optionally enabling embedded \-escapes), and can be "aliased" to any of the usual flavors of "echo" by including thright combination of options in the prefix. I named it "gecho" (for "generic", not "GNU") and can provide specs and/or implementation upon request.
