On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 2:34 PM, John McKown <john.archie.mck...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 1:10 AM, Geir Hauge <geir.ha...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> ...
>
>
>> though printf should be preferred over echo:
>>
>> while read -r line; do printf '%s\n' "$line"; done < test.txt
>>
>
> I've never read about using printf in preference to echo. Why is that? I
> have used it myself in special cases, such as wanting leading zeros
> (i=0;printf '%03d\n' "${i}";)
>
Posix says:
It is not possible to use *echo* portably across all POSIX systems unless
both *-n* (as the first argument) and escape sequences are omitted.
The *printf*
<http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/printf.html>
utility can be used portably to emulate any of the traditional behaviors of
the *echo* utility as follows (assuming that *IFS* has its standard value
or is unset)
