On 15/10/2021 23:37, Philip Rowlands wrote:
On Fri, 15 Oct 2021, at 18:42, Roger Pack wrote:
It came to my attention recently that it seems not possible to "echo" the
string "-e"
$ echo "-e"
Nitpick: the double quotes aren't doing anything here.
Perhaps echo could add a "--" style param like
$ echo -- -e
These are both covered by the documentation
https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/echo-invocation.html
"... the normally-special argument ‘--’ has no special meaning and is treated like
any other string."
"If the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set, then when echo’s first argument
is not -n it outputs option-like arguments instead of treating them as options."
Thus the way to make this work is:
$ POSIXLY_CORRECT=1 /bin/echo -e
-e
Also worth mentioning that printf(1) is preferable.
It has less edge cases and portability issues.
cheers,
Pádraig
