On 8/31/23 5:15 PM, Eric Blake wrote:
It's not hard to see why POSIX is choosing to have Issue 8 obsoleting
(not removing) %b's old semantics; in the short term, nothing about %b
changes, so your dusty-deck shell scripts will continue to work as
they have before; but you now have enough time to update your scripts.
History has shown us that many will not.
The question is whether Issue 9 (several years down the road) will be
able to repurpose %b to mean binary literal output (only possible if
all shell authors agree that C2X compatibility is worth it),
Unlikely.
But if POSIX _is_ able to repurpose %b (because enough shell authors
agree that binary output is more useful these days than XSI echo
compatibility),
I think you'll find that, regardless of its origins, there are more scripts
using the %b specifier than you think.
the followon question is whether there should be a
portable way to access the old functionality. Since %#s is currently
unspecified, we are trying to guage feedback of how many
implementations are willing to add that alias now, which in turn will
affect whether Issue 9 can mandate that behavior (because everyone
liked it) or must continue to leave it undefined.
But nothing is stopping coreutils from adding %#s as an extension now,
regardless of what input other shell authors provide to the ongoing
POSIX discussion.
I don't have a problem adding %#s. I have a problem with POSIX not seeing
that the printf builtin is not a direct parallel to the library function
and forcing an incompatible change.
--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU c...@case.edu http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/
