On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 06:49:51AM -0500, John McKown wrote: > ???Ah. Thanks. I only use BASH and the GNU infrastructure, so I have never > run into that problem. I think I'll change my habits, just in case I run > across a system which doesn't have it (especially in my scripts)
Every implementation of echo has *some* input on which it fails, including bash's implementation. imadev:~$ type echo echo is a shell builtin imadev:~$ x=-n imadev:~$ echo "$x" imadev:~$ printf '%s\n' "$x" -n You simply hadn't run into any of the failure cases yet.
