>>>>> On Thu, 01 Aug 2019, Pádraig Brady wrote: > I agree this is a bit surprising.
Indeed, it most certainly violates the principle of least surprise. Especially, it means that a shell script that will run in bash won't run in a shell that doesn't have a built-in printf. > The full manual states: > "Unicode characters in the ranges > U+0000...U+009F, U+D800...U+DFFF cannot be specified by this syntax, > except for U+0024 ($), U+0040 (@), and U+0060 (`)." > This was previously discussed at: > https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2008-05/threads.html#00067 So, there are reasons for this restriction in C99. However, I fail to see how those reasons would apply to printf. Except for the surrogates U+D800...U+DFFF, it looks like an arbitrary restriction, which only makes the printf implementation incompatible with other GNU programs (like Bash and Emacs).
