Well, I made some more research: I think this can be closed as WON'T FIX
This seem to be a feature (not a bug) to comply exactly to POSIX, **nothing more**. Here is the related POSIX documentation: http://www.unix.com/man-page/POSIX/1posix/printf/ It specifies octal escaping, and it also explains that Hexadecimal escaping can be ambiguous (the explanation is far fetched!) So ash might have added the \x but dash removed it (probably) to be strictly POSIX to the minimum. Also, we don't have \u or \U escaping for Unicode. If you need \x, \u or \U, the workaround is to use the GNU printf instead of the builtin. Sorry for the inconvenience; -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1499473 Title: dash printf builtin does not honor \xNN to print hexadecimal To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dash/+bug/1499473/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
