Re: echo "enhancement" leads to confused legacy script tools...

[Paul Eggert]

Andreas Schwab <schwab@suse.de> writes:

> But note that bash interprets -n as an option, which is not compliant with
> XSI.

Bash doesn't claim conformance to XSI, so that's OK as far as Bash is
concerned.  Autoconf (and I assume Squid) is supposed be portable to
all POSIX hosts, not merely POSIX+XSI hosts, so it should work with
Bash; so this is still a bug in either Autoconf or Squid, not in Bash.

There's a little history here.  POSIX 1003.2-1992 said that echo has
implementation-defined behavior if given any options, or if any
operands contain '\'.  This allows both traditional (echo -n) and
System V (backslash) interpretation.

SUSv2 came down squarely on the System V side.

But the BSD folks revolted on this, and POSIX 1003.1-2001 reverted to
the POSIX 1003.2-1992 spec, with the compromise of putting the System
V stuff into the XSI ghetto.